Blog hosting is a service that allows you to publish the contents of a blog online.
Blog hosting services may be free or paid for. Free blog hosting providers include Google's Blogger and WordPress. When you use a free blog hosting service, you register with the service and set up your blog using their tools. Your blog URL will include the blog hosting service within it. For example, a blog hosted on Google's free blog hosting service might have a url like - www.myblog.blogspot.com.
TypePad is another popular blog hosting service, and while it offers a free trial, TypePad's blog hosting service is not free. At last check, TypePad's blog hosting service cost from $4.95 per month to $89.95 per month, depending on the features you need. TypePad offers a discount for paying a year at a time.
Do It Yourself Blog Hosting
Another option is to purchase a domain name and have the blog platform (software system) installed on your web server. The benefit of this is not only that you control the domain name but any links that point to your blog are credited to your domain for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, giving your blog and your website (if both are on the same domain) better ranking power in the search engines. With free blog hosting like WordPress and Blogger, all links pointing to your blog actually give WordPress and Blogger the SEO benefit of the incoming links.
Most website hosts now offer the ability to automatically install a blogging platform, like WordPress on the server that hosts your website. For example, if you have a business with a domain name of myhomebusiness, you could set up your blog with your website hosting service to be installed in a way that your blog address would be myhomebusiness/blog or blog.myhomebusiness.com.
