what blog site should I use?

[Marieanne]

Hi Amanda,

I would recommend you to stay away from free blogs, since you are at the mercy of the company and if they decide they no longer want to do business with you they can delete your account whenever they want. If your blog grows into something big then you would lose everything if anything bad happens to Blogger or Tumblr. I would buy a domain from Namecheap and install Wordpress on a private hosting account.

the problem with web hosting is that all reviews and recommendations you find around including the ones on sites such as Wordpress.org and Joomla.org are paid. The hosts actually pay the webmasters a commission or fixed fee to get listed in their list of "recommended sites". Many hosts gain a great reputation because they pay a lot for this type of advertising, and whichever review site you come across, you find their name on it. People start thinking that the host is awesome and spread the word. The truth is that those kind of hosts are actually the worst you can subscribe to.

I jumped from one to another for weeks, trying their crappy services and requesting a refund each time (which you should for every host that doesn't deliver). Then I came across a forum called Web Hosting Talk through a Google search and the users there explained what is going on. Advertising hosts on WHT is prohibited, but I came across http://hostingreviews.wiki.lc/ in one of the posts, which had reviews that actually gave out information on the speed and uptime of the hosts. You will notice that the most popular ones got the worst responses. I took a ride with one of the free trial offers and so far so good.