There are many platforms for blogging out there today and new ones keep coming. We can segregated between the Self-Hosted and Hosted (by the blog provider). Both the categories have Free and Paid options. We will discuss the Free options for the Self Hosted category, and both, paid and free for the Hosted category.
In today’s world it is possible for one person to create a website, a blog or a community which can serve thousands and have a regular passive income. The path to that starts with understanding and choosing the right option.
Free Self Hosted Blogging Platforms
Free-Hosted options
Paid Hosted Options
- SquareSpace (20 pages: $13/mn to Unlimited: 40/mn or 36/mn for 1 yr, $32/mn for 2 yr)
- DrupalGardens (Free: 50 MB to Unlimited ($79.95 per mnth / $49.92/mn when signup for a yr)
In this series we will evaluate all these options and give you the details of how to set up a website with each of them.
With respect to comparisons between the hosted blog providers, I came across the charts from Compete pitting Tumblr against WordPress and Blogger (from Google). The results were fairly shocking for me. It seems that Tumblr trumps WordPress and Blogger in terms of user engagement. In terms of Page Views and Attention, it is so far ahead of wordpress and blogger, that they cannot catch up easily. For the unique visitors, WordPress is way ahead of the other two – while Tumblr is a clear #2.
What these graphs, a few things clearly come out:
- Blogger is a dying platform
- Tumblr has more engagement of the people who are visiting, although WordPress has higher unique visitors.
- Tumblr’s social engagement functionality along with blogging and a very flexible expression ability is appealing to the new generation, which engages most on Tumblr.
Let us go now and compare the main free hosted platforms on the same competitive parameters. This will give us a bird’s eye view of what these platforms offer and how they can be used.
Click on the image for larger full image.
[ *Tumblr2Wordpress . ** Blogger to Tumblr]
(Image courtesy: stevendepolo)