Welcome back for this chapter 2 of ”How to start a blog” The next step to create your own blog! I assume you have a better idea about your concept now and you want to go further by choosing what tools you want to use. You can still have a look on Chapter 1 if you want to refresh your mind. Hosting Platform – Free or Paid When it comes to choose a free or paid blog hosting platform ask you this: Do you want to own your content or not? Be warned that all your posts you wrote can vanish into a digital black hole if you are hosted by someone else. Why? Because hosting your blog on a free site means that none of your content, photos, or even the domain itself actually belongs to you… But when you host your blog yourself or pay for hosting on a reliable server you have legal rights to your content. Definitely not an option if you want to build a professional platform. You have plenty good free blog hosting platforms by the way. Blogger and Tumblr are my favourite because they are very popular and you can find a huge community to help you and communicate with. Digital Trends made a good post on Freeblogs : Go and have a look Active Wirehead has his own domain and uses an open source and free blog software. So let’s have a look and see how you can build your own business! I want my own blog! Step 1- Get a Domain name A domain name is a unique name that will identify your website. You need to buy one and it’s cheap! You already have your concept and maybe the name of your blog, so now you have to find a good domain name. It could be the name of your blog actually. Advice: Go with a trusted company! Here some of them you can trust: GoDaddy, Bluehost, Gandi, Namecheap.. Step 2- Choose a Web host A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. Some of Domain Name companies are also offer web hosting services. GoDaddy, BlueHost and Justhost are some of them. Check this site who reviews a ton of web host in 2014! After this overview and in the next chapter I will give you a clear and real example with a self-hosted platform I use for this blog. A step by step process only for you 🙂 Stay tuned and if you have any question or comment feel free to reply!
