Blogging, or keeping a journal online

has become a popular way to keep friends and family in the loop and let them know what’s going on in your life. For those that are interested in setting up one of their own, there are two choices – to go with a paid host, or a free host. Which should you choose?

The biggest advantage to free web hosting

is pretty obvious. It’s free! Don’t let that one fact make your decision for you though. It may be a big advantage, but oftentimes it’s the only advantage. Free sites also restrict the amount of space that you will be able to use for uploads. Graphics, music, videos, all of these eat away at that. Paid hosting does have a limited amount of space that you can use as well, but it’s often a much larger amount than what you get with a free site. This means you can upload a lot more family photos and video before you even have to think about how much space you have available.

Paid sites offer more options

for customizing the overall look of your blog as well. They often come with more templates than a free site does, so you can pick a look that fits your personality. With free sites, the selection for templates is either much smaller, or pretty much nonexistent. Paid sites also offer you the ability to use your own domain name with your blog, whereas free servers give you a long website address with their name in it (like www.sitenamehere.com/yournamehere).

If you want to make a good first impression

or have a highly customizable site, then it may be with the small monthly fee to get yourself on a shared hosting server. If you’re not really interested in all of that, and just want a place to store your thoughts.