Image courtesy: VoodooBoo

If you know about what blogging is, there is no need to explain about self hosted blog and vendor hosted blogs. I thought to compare these two types of blogs in this post as it will give you some idea about both and what suits you most. Please make sure that this is the personal opinion of mine and you are free to comment on anything I publish in this post.

Thanks to the generosity of the blog platform vendors like Wordpress and Blogger we are blogging with a great freedom and most of us generate a reasonable income from them. They can be mainly divided into two categories, self hosted blogs and vendor hosted blogs. Some vendors like Wordpress provide both self hosted and vendor hosted facilities. Some vendors only provide vendor hosted facility (like blogger.com).

I think it is better to choose a self hosted blog if you are planning to blog for a long time and keep it with a unique domain name. Then it will be easier for you to customize your blog with various techniques and plugins. It will guarantee the total control of your blog is with you and you are the pilot. You won’t get the problem of paying for additional space quota in vendor hosted blogs if you host it in your own package. If you plan to improve your blog to a money making one, I firmly believe that you must go for a self hosted blog. Because there are some restrictions made on the vendor hosted blogs regarding advertising and other income related methods and techniques. It won’t be easy with the vendor hosted blogs if you plan to carry out our own advertising and marketing campaigns in your blog. If you are willing to add more customized features like email, chat, etc. you will have to definitely host your blog in your own hosting package.

It is better to go for a vendor hosted blog if you are experimenting or doing non-commercialized blogging. It won’t take a cent from your money. I have seen some blogs which are vendor hosted and having a great rank. Most of them are technical and non-profit oriented blogs. The choice depends on your intention about the blog. Vendor hosted blogs will reduce stress on handling your blog and maintaining it compared to self hosted blogs. If you plan to self host, you must do blogging platform updates by yourself where you will not have to any updates in vendor hosted blogs as they are automatically updated. If you don’t care about the web address (you will get a sub domain in a vendor hosted blog) and making money from it, I recommend you to go for a vendor hosted blog.

These are the main factors I feel when comparing self hosted blogs and vendor hosted blogs. If you are having more thoughts which are not mentioned here, you are warmly welcome to add them here as comments. I’m developing a small flash component for your website or blog if you are interested to download FREELY. I will let you know about it in a future post.