When I started writing this blog a couple of weeks ago, the first name that came to mind was... Wordpress! It's popularity among bloggers is great! They have such a strong branding among bloggers, that I didn't think twice about which site to host my blog on.
Now, I wanted to make changes, and that's when things started to become complicated. Firstly, trying to point my blog to my own domain name, Wordpress started talking money. Their Domain Mapping System costs $13 per year. It was also extremely complicated. It would probably be easy if I had a popular host like GoDaddy or Hover or something like that. Another option was that I register a new domain through them which would cost me $18 per year. The prices are very reasonable, but for someone who is just doing it as a hobby, without getting any income from it, even paying a few bucks is something to consider.
Another problem I faced was that I wanted to use Google AdSense on my blog and try to monetize it. Wordpress does not allow ads on blogs hosted on their own domain. So, either I pay them and get my own domain to earn money, or stay on the free model and not monetize it either! Such tight restrictions came as a big surprise to me.
Apart from that, I wanted to customize the look of my blog. Trying to customize it, I needed to pay $30 per year more to be able to custom design it. So, any changes from the regular old stuff I would need to pay more! Even though they have a lot of template options, I wanted to have the freedom to customize it.
Doing some searches online, I came across Google's competitor to Wordpress: Google Blogger. As it has always been the case with Google, they don't charge for anything! In fact, integrating Google AdSense with my blog was a matter of a couple of clicks. If I want to register my own domain, I just need to type it into one setting of Blogger and it's done. Customizing the whole look is very simple (and of course free!). They even give an option of customizing the CSS of the blog.
As it is quite obvious, I have decided to move my blog from Wordpress (zefhash.wordpress.com) to Google Blogger (zefscapers.blogspot.com) effective immediately. Fortunately, Wordpress didn't charge me to do that! :)
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