How about Free Blog Hosting?

Blogs are popular and many newbies start with free blogs like Blogger.
Do Free blog hosting sites make money? What are hosting costs?

 

Well, that would all depend on the amount of folks using the free blog platform that is being offered!.

 

They are a good place to get started with (get your feet wet )

 

If you are looking to host your own free blog hosting service, it can be profitable. If it was not profitable, other free blog services wouldn't be surviving. Keep in mind that CAN is a key word here. You would be stepping into a ring against a few giants, along with a ton of other little guys who all thought they would get somewhere with the same idea.

Will you be marketing through email to your users to try and make money? Do you want to charge for premium accounts (access to better templates, locally hosted image/video, extra features, etc) and use those to pay for all the free acounts too? Will you be using a shared adsense script and require the displaying of adsense to gain ad revenue from the free blogs? Will you put in a header above each blog that displays your ads? Do you have another way of making a profit? If you plan to monetize from an outside source (such as ads) you should also consider what you are going to allow your users to host and how strict you are going to be, or practically aka profitably be, with enforcing it to ensure your revenue stream doesn't back out because their ads were displayed on a blog that violated their terms.

As far as hosting costs, a dedicated server for a couple hundred per month should be a good start if you have a small user base when you open but you should also consider the problems with putting everything on one server now if you will need to expand later. You may want to take things into consideration regarding what is handled by a given server, like image/video hosting, databases, coding/scripts, member account information (ssl?), etc.

What will make people choose to use your service over well developed and popular services like Wordpress or Blogger? What can you offer that they don't, or that they won't copy from you as soon as they see you have a decent idea? If you feel you have a good idea that they aren't taking advantage of, ask yourself why they aren't doing so already and be serious about the answer you try to give yourself.

There are many other things to consider, much more than I care to try listing in this forum post. You have lot more questions to ask yourself and find answers to, and I would suggest that you put them all down into a business plan once you get them figured out so you can go over it and find holes where new questions can go, repeating the process of asking and finding answers until you have something truly solid to work from.

 

If you have strong niche, unique content, up to date articles there is no reason to be unsuccesful

 

the content of the blog would matter if the blog is to return money

 

It not the free or paid nature of a blog that determines it success but traffic. Hosting prices vary from $9 to $24.95 or even more depending on the hosting company.

 

Blogger tends to be the best blogging platform for the bloggers who want to earn money without purchasing the paid hosting. You can also purchase a domain name and use it on blogger account to give it a unique domain name. But I prefer wordpress which has much more customizations than any other blogging software.

 

I make more and rank higher with free blogger than with my
own domain with WP.

If I just wanted a blog, and to make money, blogger would be it.

But a domain sure looks cool.

Stephen C