As a follow up to my last post, I would like to take this time to let everyone know of a few free blog hosts. These hosts provide free blogs, usually ad supported, but a few offer “paid” memberships that allow you to customize the look of your blog and get rid of the ads.

LiveJournal – one of the first free blogging services I heard about, they offer free communities as well. You can find blogs and communities about just about anything there. They offer free and paid memberships. The ads are pretty unobtrusive and usually match your blog content pretty well.

DeadJournal – listed as being a place to host the blogs that no one wants to see or host. A lot of my Goth friends from Texas had their journals on DeadJournal, especially since at one point, LiveJournal required an invite code from a current member to get a free account, where DeadJournal did not.

Vox – LiveJournal, Vox, and TypePad are SixApart companies (the same ones who have Movable Type blogging platform). Vox provide free blogs with a sense of community – your friends and favorite blogs are your “neighbors.”

Blogger – This blogging service was acquired by Google a couple of years ago, but the platform was left the same for the most part. You have a profile, can have as many blogs on one account as you can comfortably handle, plus you can even have “community blogs” where you have multiple authors on one blog. Your address here will be http://yourblog.blogspot.com not http://yourblog.blogger.com however.

Xanga – another free blogging service that allows you to customize your blog with a layout. They have hundreds of free layouts to choose from and you can arrange your blog to your liking. The interface is fairly easy to work with as well.

WordPress.com – for those who want to use WordPress but do not have their own hosting that will support it, or want to get the hang of blogging before venturing into self-hosting their WordPress blog. They offer support for importing from several of the previously mentioned blogging services if you started on one of them. They offer extra services for your blogging experience for a nominal fee.

Each of the above blogging services offer layouts/themes/templates for free use on the sites. Some allow you to customise for free (Vox allows you to change the header graphic, Blogger allows you to use a complete template for free), others require you to pay a fee (LiveJournal and WordPress.com are examples of this). LiveJournal allows for some customization without paying, but for the majority of the customizations, you will need a paid account.

Each of the above are good for beginning bloggers, although I personally recommend Blogger and WordPress.com. I have used each of these, and still hold accounts on all of them. There are other blogging sites as well, this is by no means a complete list. But it is meant to give you a few options to explore when looking to start a new blog without having to commit to paying for hosting and a domain.

One of the things I find interesting is the various choices of hosting that people will choose for their blogs. Some of them choose free hosting services like Blogger or WordPress hosted blogs. Others will go for a LiveJournal, DeadJournal, or what have you. Others, like myself, choose to run self-hosted WordPress blogs. It is really up to your personal preference how you want to handle it. Most beginning bloggers will use a free blogging service until they get the hang of it. Then they want more control over their blogs than the free blogging services will give them.

That is where services like those offered at Web Hosting Geeks come in. They can tell you which hosts have won web hosting awards, which ones will support WordPress or the blogging platform of your choice, and which ones to stay away from. There are reviews from users of the various hosting services, so you can be assured it isn’t someone who was paid to say how great the service is.

They even have a blog that you can read, to get all the latest updates in web hosting. There are things you need to know about web hosting, and sites like this can tell you what you need to know. Don’t just take the first web host that comes up in a search, do some research and make sure of what you are paying for, or not paying for. It could definitely save you some heartache in the end.