Should I use a free blogging site or create a new domain/web hosting?

[Jake]

Two 'old school' blog choices.

Google's Blogger.com is perhaps the least restrictive free blog host, generally they have no editorial restrictions other than the worst of the illegal, there are no paid upgrades, it does use a relatively simple proprietary blog engine with a limited number of widgets.

Wordpress.com is the slightly limited, free hosted version of the well known Wordpress blog engine, they do charge for adding a custom domain name.

The industry standard blog engine Wordpress has countless free and commercial plugins and themes, about 17% of the top 1 million web sites use Wordpress. There is a free wordpress host wordpress.com which has some sort of paid upgrades for things like a custom domain name or added revenue earning, using the multi-user version of Wordpress there are some limitations of the free hosted version.

There are no decent free domain names, you either get the Post Office Box like subdomain yoursite.hostname.com or pay about $12/yr for a custom domain name like yoursite.com.

More serious blog writers tend to use a paid host running the unrestricted version of Wordpress for which the host typically has a semi-automatic installer. Paid host are about $8 a month, including 1 domain name, many allow unlimited added sites and domain names which you can get elsewhere for about $12 a year.