Look at it from a business aspect and think about the long term of your new business. If you bo become successful will free hosting with less control be for you or paid hosting with full control be for you. Its a matter of preference.
I guess for alternatives You can try a niche using blogspot then if You're sure with that niche buy a .com and also the hosting
Well, I'd rather just register a domain instead of using the sub-domain system. But, I'll have to go with the Blogspot. Yugo,
I have an experiment going on right now with blogspot and a domain with the same phrase. I have treated them the same in the last 2 weeks with backlinks and articles. The domain is showing about 550 backlinks and the blogspot about 240. The domain is also ranking much better in yahoo and google is only tanking for 3 of 13 terms in yahoo on the first page. In google it is ranking for 4 terms but between 150-300. So I am finding at this point using the same search terms similar backlinks with pr and same keywordphase in url the domain is way ahead ... it is a .com I have to add blogspot is indexed in both SE's but is not even showing in the first 500 hundred results even with that many backlinks.
i have 3 blog one i just made, its use wordpress and i got indexed in 1 day not sure why, but i did and my others it took at least 3-5 days.
No, I think Blogspot indexes faster than WordPress. This seems to apply for new blogs started this year. I think Google is cracking down on all the thousands of new sites being launched everyday, the majority of which seems to be WordPress based. I think this is due to Caffeine.
I think most of us that suggest wordpress here are referring to self-hosted wordress. You can almost do anything you want with the available plugins out there for wordpress and this is one of the main reasons why many blogspot users switch to wordpress because blogspot has limited functions.