What is required to start free blogs service like http://www.blogspot.com/ http://wordpress.com/ ? What are costs of hosting, design, maintenance involved? Do you need many users to start making money?
Hosting could cost quite a lot. It's not only dependant on how many users you have, but also how much BW they use. For instance, if someone is putting downloads on the site which are GBs, your bandwidth is going to go up very quickly and the cost of hosting will go up with it. If your site gets popular you're looking at quite a few VPS servers in my opinion. Design, well, it needs to be unique, and you need to make it so that all the blogs that you host have a linkback to your main site (so for Blogger, all the blogs will have a link to Blogger somewhere on the page). This could cost quite a lot to setup. Maintenance wise, probably not that much. You'll need to moderate, and, obviously if your site gets popular, this could cost quite a lot as you'll need to hire a few people.
Starting blog with free services is easy but you won't have that much control which you'll have with your own domain name and hosting yourself.
that market is saturated, i wont recommend doing that because, you will need to spend a lot of money to market it, unless your new blog will be something extremely good and well made that will offer something new
Its as easy as eating ice cream to start this 1.Hire a coder to code the script for you. 2.Hire a designer to design the theme for you. 3.Promote it The cost is around $5k.And for beginning,you can use VPS as the hosting platform and then changed to dedicated server when your site received many traffic.Yes you need to have at least 400 user to start making profit
that market wouldn't be friendly to you, and it would cost millions to get started as those websites cost alot of $$$ to get off the ground
I would think that trying to compete with blogger.com and wordpress.com would be one of the most difficult and very highest entry-barrier courses to follow online. Also, I think that nowadays almost all serious bloggers appreciate that if they don't host their own blog, they don't really own it and have little remedy available in the event of its disappearance: after all, one would want one's blog to be hosted only by a very well-established company with a pretty impeccable reputation, no?
I would start with wordpress.org ... and once your site took off it's easy to move all your content to your own domain. Godaddy for example as pre installed wordpress servers. If you need more information or help, feel free to PM me.
It would cost you $0 if you installed WPMU (google it), you would only need a domain name and hosting which isn't expensive at all! I'm trying to get this one (http://blogleaf.com/) started but I have to admit it's not easy and right now a bot is trying to create a huge amount of new users and I can't stop it even not by integrating CAPTCHA when registering... Regards.