Picking a Host for Your Blog

Blogging is the new internet phenomenon that comes with endless possibilities. Blogs can be used to communicate with friends or family, publish works of writing, create online communities, make money with advertising, among other things. One of the hardest decisions you will have to make after you decide to start a blog will be who you will use as your host.

Blogger
Blogger was first released to there public in 1999 by Pyra Labs . In 2003, Blogger was bought out by the online empire Google. Google redesigned Blogger and brought it into the techno world we live in today. Hundreds of thousands of accounts have been created and many are added each day. Blogger is the largest blog host on the web. Some of the benefits of Blogger include the plentiful amount of templates to choose from. Another important feature of Blogger is that you can use your Google account to do basically everything on the site, including publishing and commenting. Being the largest blog host on the web, Blogger will not be going anywhere soon.

WordPress
WordPress was released in 2003 and is distributed thru the GNU General Public License. Although not as fancy as Blogger at the time, WordPress attracts many users due to it's public license and ease of use. Many people acknowledge that WordPress has some of the best templates available for blogging. For online communities, WordPress has developed "WordPress MU". MU allows blogs to have various authors, resulting in more active websites with more readers. In recent years, WordPress has become a leader in blog hosting and may very well become more popular than Google's Blogger in the upcoming years.

Live Journal
Live Journal was created in 1999 by a high school student. It was made by Brad Fitzpatrick for communication between him and his friends. In 2005, Live Journal was sold to Six Apart for an undisclosed sum of money. One feature exclusive to Live Journal that the other blog sites don't have is a customized friends list. This friends list feature often turns away bloggers who wish to make money with their blogs as the appearance is unprofessional. Although Live Journal is not as popular as Blogger or WordPress, it has still achieved a milestone of having over 14 million blogs in it's database.

Listed above, in order of popularity, are the most known blog hosts. While all serve a similar purpose, it is suggested that you research all three of them to see which one fits your needs best.