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Best sites to host a blog?

N

Noisemaker

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Original poster
Mar 13, 2009
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I'm looking at doing a blog, and using Adsense for revenue from it.

What blogging sites are recommended? I'll be looking to update it daily, or every other day, and I'd prefer to be able to update from my iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad. I also want to be able to customize the look of the blog.

Being able to insert photos into blog posts would be great as well.

What site do you guys recommend using to do this?
 
Blogger.com lets you have ads, domain mapping, and it's free.

Kind of hard to argue with that.

Otherwise i'd recommend MediaTemple Grid service, but at $20 a month you'd be better off with blogger.
 
iFanboy said:
Blogger.com lets you have ads, domain mapping, and it's free.

Kind of hard to argue with that.

Otherwise i'd recommend MediaTemple Grid service, but at $20 a month you'd be better off with blogger.
Click to expand...

Does wordpress allow ads as well, or is that Blogger only?
 
wordpress.com is the online service.

It prevents you from using javascript (no ads for you, but they reserve the right to display ads on your blog, although i've never seen a wordpress.com ad) and you're limited in your choice of theme unless you purchase the CSS upgrade to code your own themes (although they do have about 100 themes to choose from initially, and some of those are quite customisable)

Wordpress.org is the free downloadable blogging software that you'll have to install on a host yourself, like bluehost or mediatemple. You can obviously do what you like with that since you control every part of it.

Personally, I like wordpress.com - it's very polished and professional, can take being dugg and reddit'ed, and although it's locked down more, many professionals have chosen this option for it's speed, ease of use, and professional looking templates.

Blogger.com is an older, less obviously updated service (parts of the interface don't look like they've been touched since 2001!), but you do have more freedom to use your own themes, display ads, and the like. The stock blogger themes look awful and cheap however. You're going to need to google for a professional looking blogger template to upload if you choose blogger IMHO. Oh, and since Blogger is Google's blogging service, it also handles extreme traffic with ease.

DO NOT use tumblr. It's rubbish. It's like a stripped down MySpace like blog IMHO. Or VOX, that's the worst of the lot.
 
Adsense is worthless untill you get thousands of hits per day. Hoast your own site with bluehost.com and install wordpress from the cpanel.
 
I use commission junction and linkshare as affiliates and select advertisers from their members I don't particularly like adsense.
 
Linkshare asks if you earn more then 1 million dollars a year so I know the op's blog won't. So linkshare won't work.
 
Noisemaker said:
I'm looking at doing a blog, and using Adsense for revenue from it.

What blogging sites are recommended? I'll be looking to update it daily, or every other day, and I'd prefer to be able to update from my iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad. I also want to be able to customize the look of the blog.

Being able to insert photos into blog posts would be great as well.

What site do you guys recommend using to do this?
Click to expand...

The one place that can do all of these things is Squarespace. You can embed your code from Google's Adsense to make money. They have an amazing iPhone app that lets you post, view your blog and comments, and it lets you see a break down of all of the users that viewed your blog. It is extremely easy to customize your website too so you can make your blog look how ever you want it to! You can get a 2 week free trail at http://squarespace.com.

This is currently what I am hosting my site on (below), and I love their service. I would definitely suggest checking them out. At least get a 2 week free trial!
 
bthockey said:
The one place that can do all of these things is Squarespace. You can embed your code from Google's Adsense to make money. They have an amazing iPhone app that lets you post, view your blog and comments, and it lets you see a break down of all of the users that viewed your blog. It is extremely easy to customize your website too so you can make your blog look how ever you want it to! You can get a 2 week free trail at http://squarespace.com.

This is currently what I am hosting my site on (below), and I love their service. I would definitely suggest checking them out. At least get a 2 week free trial!
Click to expand...

I really wanted to use Squarespace to host a site, but it didn't turn out that I could even break even with a $20/month Squarespace plan and another plan to host a forum elsewhere. What's your take on the cost? I can see you're using the $8 plan if I'm not mistaken. I wish Squarespace included every feature in the $8 plan and you just add to pay for additional storage and bandwith, that would be great.
 
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