Self-Hosting
Where you locate your blog can impact what you can do with it. If you host your blog on something such as BlogSpot, you can only host your web pages on this site, not additional files, such as graphics or other media files. However, hosting your own web site for your blogs isn’t always a trivial exercise.
Why Self-Host?
BlogSpot (http://www.blogspot.com) is a handy place to park your blog when first starting out. The cost is very cheap — $12/year to eliminate the ad if it bothers you (it will!). No maintenance, no hassles with working things out with an ISP, and so on. However, there are two primary disadvantages to hosting your blog on BlogSpot.
The first is, as stated earlier, you can’t load other files on to the server or run other technologies such as PHP or ASP. You can work around this limitation, somewhat, by hosting your graphics at a free web server, such as http://freeservers.com. In addition, other bloggers are usually willing to give up some space for graphics, though, you may have to work through them to get the graphics uploaded. Unfortunately, this won’t help if you want to use server-side technologies such as PHP. For this, you’ll have to self-host.
The second reason not to use BlogSpot is that it is, at times, an extremely overworked server, leading to slow page loads and occasional server failures. The subscription-based Blogger Pro gets you access to faster and more reliable servers, however.
You will almost definitely need a subscription ISP service ...
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