I received the following question in an email from a reader:

What companies host blogs? Any tips or tricks or any roads you traveled and recommend staying away from?

That’s a good question. I’ve been writing blogs and running websites for so long that sometimes I forget that the basic questions like these aren’t obvious to everyone.

If you want to start your own blog, you can basically go two different directions: Free solutions that are super-easy to set up, but have limitations and less customization possibility, or non-free solutions that give you great flexibility but require some more advanced knowledge.

If you just want to start a simple blog, there are plenty of options out there that are totally free. For the first few years over at Seattle Bubble, I used Google’s free blogging site Blogger. They’re a decent option, that give you fair amount of ability to customize, while still making it easy for beginners. Another free option is WordPress, which is very similar to Blogger, but just runs a different software package to power the blog.

If you sign up for either of these free services, your blog address will be something like thisismyblog.blogspot.com or thisismyblog.wordpress.com. If you want your own domain name like thisismyblog.com, you’re going to have to get a little more advanced.

My personal preference (which is not free) is to buy hosting with a reputable company, buy a domain name, and install the (free) stand-alone version of WordPress. For domain names, you can just go to Go Daddy or Register.com. It shouldn’t cost you more than $10 per year for a dot-com.

For hosting it’s a little more complicated, but basically what you want is a web host that has php and mysql support (since that’s what WordPress runs on). For a small site, you can usually find decent hosting for less than $10 per month. I use Host Gator, and have had a good experience with them so far. I was with another host, Dreamhost, for about a year, and definitely do not recommend them. Go Daddy is also a decent host with a fairly good reputation.

It’s also completely possible to start with one of the free solutions and then down the road migrate to a for-pay solution. In fact, that’s exactly what I did with Seattle Bubble, which was originally hosted at Blogger, but eventually migrated to a stand-alone WordPress installation on my own domain name.  Going this route allows you to “test drive” blogging without spending any money, to see if it’s something that you will really be able to stay motivated to do long-term.  Down the road, if you find that the free solutions don’t offer you enough flexibility, you can pay a little bit of money and get more options in return.

I hope this answers some of the questions out there about getting started with a blog.  If anyone has any more questions, don’t hesitate to ask.