Blog Hosting
A blog takes up disk space and must be served from a web server. If you already own (or pay for space on) a web server, you probably want to host your blog there. For example, Neil Gaiman's web site contains a biography, a bibliography, FAQs, a message board, and much more, so it's the logical place to keep his blog. Some tools (for example, Greymatter, Movable Type, Blosxom, Slash, Zope, and Manila) can be installed on your server. Others (for example, Blogger and Radio UserLand) can publish your blog to your site by uploading files via FTP. FTPing your blog files can become very time consuming, though, for blogs with many entries.
Installing software on your web server requires some know-how (logging into Unix or adding software to a Windows or Macintosh server, where are the CGI programs kept, and so on) that may eliminate some choices for the less tech-savvy.If you don't already have web hosting, or you're just getting started online, or even if you're an old hand but simply don't want to pay for the bandwidth used by your blog, you can choose to host it on someone else's server. Radio UserLand, Blogger, and LiveJournal come with free hosting.
There are caveats to blog hosting services, though. Blogger's free service, BlogSpot, puts banner advertisements on your blog (they do offer an ad-free service for $13/year). The LiveJournal service doesn't let you host your blog on anywhere but LiveJournal's web site. In all cases, when you use someone else's hosting service, you're at the mercy of their quality of service — both Blogger and UserLand have had occasional outages. And although it hasn't happened yet, if your blog hosting service goes broke, your blog could be a victim.
PriceLiveJournal, Blosxom, and Blogger are completely free. Blogger has an upgrade path, however: for advanced features such as RSS and Weblogs.com notification, you have to pay for Blogger Pro (now $35 per year, will be $50 per year, once all the planned features are available). LiveJournal sells a subscription ($5 for 2 months, $15 for 6 months, $25 for 12 months) that provides you with benefits such as a livejournal.com email address, text messaging, advanced customization, and faster servers.
Radio UserLand has a free 30-day trial and costs $39.95 per year. This gets you free software updates and blog hosting. You can continue to use the software after your subscription expires, but you won't receive updates and you must make separate arrangements to host your blog.Greymatter is completely free. The author accepts donations through PayPal, however. This may seem odd at first, but it enables those who can afford to pay for their software to name their own price. If you can't afford to pay, you can still use the software and not be a criminal.Movable Type is free for personal and non-profit use. Commercial users need a $150 commercial license. Personal and non-profit users can donate in a PBS-like model — $20 gets you a key to be listed on "Recently Updated Movable Type Blogs" and $45 gets you all that and support for instant messaging within certain hours.
Manila is part of the $899 commercial product called Frontier. Manila is the blog hosting and management part of the larger Frontier content-management system. You can get a free 60-day trial of Manila from http://manila.userland.com/. Slash and Zope are both open source software. You can download, install, and use them without paying. Slash is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), while Zope is released under the Zope Public License (ZPL).
