According to web monitors, the number of blogs created everyday outnumber new websites 200-fold! Astonishing, isn’t it? Why this great penchant for blogs?

For one, blogging is a personal thing. Individuals can do it. No need for technical skills. No dependency on anyone else. Just a few downloads, Cut-paste. Plug and play.

Further, blogs enable expression of ideas on the fly. Sitting in your bedroom you can form an idea or change an existing one and shoot it out to the world. A ‘blog’ is in fact short for ‘web-log’… a log / diary / journal on the web.

What’s more, blogs, being ‘democratic’ are favored by search engines. They consider blogs to be more ‘valid’ sources of information than websites, which would be biased by the website owner. For example, in Philips website you may find little or nothing about GE. But in Mr Jones blog he’d rip apart both the companies (and more) or praise them from actual user experience. Search engines reckon that prospective buyers of electronic products would get more feedback from a half-dozen such blogs than they would from as many websites… so they rank blogs high!

Additionally, blogs are interactive. People can post comments. So if the blog author has too positive a stand on something, commentators can water it down to a reasonably real level. There can be discussion. The truth can be told.

Not just this, blogs allow you to put up videos, surveys, audio clips, pictures and various things that make them really lively! Of course you can put these on websites too, but you need great programming skills. A blog uses pre-built technologies and setting it up is as easy as placing an email attachment.

And for popularity seekers, blogs are gratifying… you can build a subscriber base using the "subscribe by email or RSS" plug-in (pre-built program) and every time someone subscribes they will get your future posts right there in their mailbox. If you write meaningfully, you shall soon have a fan following!

Point made. Blogs are growing hugely and not without reason.

But why do people do websites at all? Well, one, they are more corporate and dignified. And two, they are more robust and restrict administrative control. Especially because they are permanently ‘hosted’ on high-power servers, many of which offer ecommerce facilites (which blogs do not currently feature).

So can’t a blog be hosted on a high-power server? Yes, it sure can… at as little as $7 a month. But majority of blog owners prefer the free hosting options provided by google (blogspot dot com) or wordpress dot com. I have a hosted blog at sandeepnath dot com and it serves me well to communicate and reach out to the world.

This apart, there are a few great advantages in self-hosting:

1. I can control my domain name (sandeepnath dot com) which would otherwise be sandeepnath dot wordpress dot com (which is ugh!).

2. As a self-hosted blogger you can use a lot of plug-ins. These are especially good for making your blog search engine friendly (all-in-one-seo-pack and site map creator).

3. You can also monitor visitor statistics and get reports which can help analyze where business could come from (based on what people read more).

4. You can have a unique design (free hosting implies you choose from pre-built templates).

5. You can drive people from advertising straight into a business discussion you have posted on a special page.

Again, there is a flip side. Free hosted blogs are picked up faster by search engines since they are all over the place and their networks are larger. But once you master the art of knocking the search engine doors with the right keywords in your paid-hosting blog, you will have your ‘own’ asset. I have heard of cases where the free blog got wiped out by some server administrator and years of work was vaporized in a flash.

So I wish you the best as you take your calls on these matters. There is of course no ‘right answer’ but I trust this helped. Do visit my blog and let me know how you used this article. To your success!