Create A Blog: Best Free Hosted Blog Publishing Services - Mini-Guide

Looking for a free service to host your first blog site? Doubtful about which hosted blogging service to choose? If you are still not ready to code and configure your blog by yourself or do not have the budget to hire a webmaster, a free hosted blog publishing service is positively the best road to take for the time being. In this mini-guide I have personally identified and reviewed the best free hosted blog publishing services out there.

Free, hosted blog publishing services are very easy to set up and configure and generally require you only a few minutes to get you fully started. You create an account, choose a pre-designed template, set your own site name and key content elements, adjust privacy settings and you are ready to roll.

• The key advantages of having a hosted blogging service instead of a self-hosted solution to be installed on your server are basically the advantage of having a software tool, at zero cost, that gets automatically updated without any intervention from you and which allows you to start blogging immediately.

The down sides are generally a much lower ability to customize and control the look and feel of your site, and to do other advanced customizations which may include adding specific functions or features to your site.

In choosing a free hosted blogging platform you should be careful in checking how easy it will be, if and when you will want to, to move your contents and site structure to a self-hosted, server-based blogging platform. You should also check and make sure that if you later decide to move on a more platform, you will be able to keep your site name and domain.

The more powerful, among such free hosted blogging platforms also allow you to do web traffic analysis, spam filtering, mobile posting, and a lot more.

To help you choose your ideal free blogging solution, I have here selected a few basic criteria that you can use to help yourself differentiate and evaluate your ideal hosted blogging service:

• Look and feel: how much control you have over looks and how many pre-designed templates are offered.

Privacy settings: how much can you control the setting of restrictions for who can access what on your blog.

Traffic Analysis: the ability to see the traffic statistics relative to your site. How many visitors, page views, time spent on the site, and so on.

Mobile blogging: the ability of your blogging platform to host blog posts coming directly from your mobile phone.

Domain Name Mapping: this feature allows you to have any domain name for your blog and to have to settle down for a generic or blog-platform branded site name and domain.

Content Export: the ability to easily export your site structure and contents to another blogging platform at a later time.

Support Forum: a community forum where you can freely pose technical support questions.