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It continues from How To Create A Blog (Part II). What is the best platform for your blog? How To Create A Blog (Part III).

How To Create A Blog (Part III)

3. What is the best platform for your blog?

I will limit myself to summarizing very quickly the essential points of this question, along with my personal opinion.

I recommend you to use WordPress yes or yes. And, therefore, this is the path that this guide will follow.

WordPress is the world’s leading platform. It has tens of thousands of third-party complementary products and yet it is still a free product.

There are two variants of WordPress with a similar user interface. The simplified variant, WordPress.com, which despite being enough to get most people started, is significantly less powerful than the full-equipped variant that is WordPress.org.

In return, WordPress.com is a free cloud service that allows you to create a blog in less than 5 minutes. On the other hand, WordPress.org requires you to purchase your own hosting. Unlike WordPress.com is not a simple cloud service in which you sign up and that’s it. Although the WordPress.org application as such is free, hosting does have a small monthly cost.

Many people consider the alternative from Google “Blogger”. It is a cloud service similar to WordPress.com, very good technically.

But personally, I do not advise you this option, especially for several reasons.

First. It is Google and blogging does not belong to the “core” of Google’s business, with the consequent risk of closure. But, in addition, this company has effectively shown very little consideration for its users, for example, with the recent and surprising closure of a service as popular as Google+, despite massive protests from users. Who assures you that it will not do the same with Blogger?

On the other hand, Blogger is more complicated to migrate to WordPress.org than WordPress.com.

Finally, if you want to migrate or are forced to do so will become a lost investment.

So which of these options is best for you?

To put it simply, the question is this: leaning towards one option or another. It is a question of valuing in your specific case what compensates you the most.

If you want speed and simplicity of implementation, use WordPress.com. But you must also assume its limitations.

If you want from the beginning the incredible power, flexibility and freedom that WordPress.org offers, then you have to assume a little more effort for the implementation of WordPress.org, a small monthly economic cost due to hosting and also linked to it a greater technical difficulty because you have to do not only the initial installation of WordPress, but also its maintenance.

For that reason, my clear recommendation is that you choose a hosting provider such as SiteGround, Raiola Networks or Hostgator. They do not only offers a hosting service but also a WordPress support. With this you will have an assisted maintenance that will simplify your life a lot and will significantly improve the health of your blog.

As a general rule, for the vast majority of bloggers it will be enough to start with WordPress.com. Although sooner or later, they will want to make the leap to WordPress.org.

However, if you want more than a basic blog, it may be more convenient to use WordPress.org from the beginning.

However, each case is a world and this decision is a matter of nuances that can not be addressed as they deserve in four lines.

Before making this decision I recommend a calm research and reading more about it.

How To Create A Blog (Part III) and set it up

Having reached this point and taken the previous decisions, you are now ready. So let’s move on to the technical part of this matter.

4. Buying and configuring the domain

If your blog is not a simple toy to mess with, but a “serious” project I strongly recommend that you buy your own domain. Which is also a very cheap thing.

The best option to buy a domain depends on the WordPress variant you use.

For the sake of simplicity, I recommend that if you choose WordPress.com, you use WordPress’s own domain service (about 13€/year approx.).

In the case of using WordPress.org you would have to contract it either together with your hosting service, or with a specialized domain name provider such as Namecheap or GoDaddy.

The simplest option is to contract the domain together with the hosting, although if you manage many webs it may be more interesting not to contract it together with the hosting because the providers specialized in domains usually have management tools somewhat more complete, somewhat better prices and is more comfortable if you change hosting.

In any case, neither option is bad and is also a somewhat subjective decision and subject to personal tastes.

If you actually choose to hire the domain separate from hosting, Namecheap is the provider we recommend, you can buy a .com domain at this time for about 7.5€ a year.

Once registered with a domain provider (a trivial process that shouldn’t give you any problems), you have to configure the domain to point to your blog’s hosting (i.e. use your hosting’s DNS servers).

Continue reading at: How To Create A Blog (Part IV)