Recomendations please for bloghosts

[redhappy]

Am planning to start a blog and wondering if all hosts are equal?

Disclaimer, they might not even be called hosts, just the term thats stuck in my head, basically a website I can put my blog on.

I know that I would ultimately be able to have ads on it.

Are there other things I need to consider?

Would love to see anyone else's blogs and see what you've done

If you are starting from scratch and just want to write/add pictures etc, then look at wordpress.com. They will handle all the hosting etc, and it's free. There's loads of templates to choose from to customise your blog too.

If you want to get more into customising the site, and making it very distinctive, and you like messing around with bits of coding, then you could look at wordpress.org, which you pay for and host yourself (you'll need separate webhosting too), or squarespace.com, which you pay for but they host.

There's also Blogger.com (owned by google) which you can try for free, and typepad, which I know nothing about.

It will be from scratch yes, so if necessary I'm assuming you can just upgrade in the future to a wordpress.org page/site? I'm not ready fro that yet but don't want to dismiss it for the future.

Will check out blogger.com too, thanks.

Yep, if you set up on free wordpress, if you decide you want to develop the site more technically, you can migrate the content over. You can also migrate your content from free wordpress to some other sites like squarespace and blogger (I think).

Ok, great, thanks for the info. Have looked at wordpress (free one) and it looks very straightforward so I think I'll go with that one.