When starting a blog with a tiny budget, or no budget at all, your options are really limited. You can either choose a free blog hosting service, such as WordPress or Blogger, and have your possibilities limited by their rules and terms.
Think of this: have you seen a blog on Canadian online casino games hosted on either of these services?
You can choose to register a free top level domain at FreeNOM, for example, and use a free hosting plan to run your blog. But is it worth it? Your costs will be zero, of course, but what can you expect to get in return for not paying a dime for a service?
A free hosting, coupled with a free domain or a subdomain, might just be what you need if you plan to learn how a hosting platform is used.
Web hosting providers that offer free plans allow their free users to access the ‘real thing’ when it comes to control panels and software installers, so these plans are perfect to test drive the service and gain experience before moving on to a paid plan.
They are also great to test designs and scripts, and even great for a simple website that only needs to be up for a short while.
Free hosting plans usually come with limitations when it comes to resources. A page hosted on a free server usually takes longer to load compared to a paid plan, and the resources the server allocates for a free plan are most of the times very limited.
Hosting HTML and CSS on a free website, and the execution of client-side scripts (like JavaScript) will most likely not be a problem at all, but when it comes to more demanding PHP applications, you may run into issues.
These impose a much heavier load on the server, and resources are scarce on free hosting plans.
Besides, the size of the MySQL databases offered with a free hosting plan is usually also limited – typically to 10 or 20 megabytes.
This is enough for a small website, or a small blog with not much content published on it, but many applications burn through such a small size in no time.
So, if you are an absolute beginner in the world of blogging, and want to test drive a self-hosted WordPress, for example, you can do so quickly and with no additional costs at a free hosting service, such as AwardSpace or UK.am.
But if you are serious about creating content, or plan to work with your blog for a long time, save yourself the trouble of having to move your blog to a new host; start with a paid hosting and a properly registered domain name from day one.
