How to Choose Between Hosted Or Standalone Blogging Platforms

Choosing your blogging platform initially is very important especially if you want to earn money from your blog. It would be troublesome to change to another blogging platform later in your process of blogging. Let's look at their specific advantages/disadvantages of the the different blogging platforms helping you choose your initial path correctly.

Pros Of Hosted Blogging Platform
-It is usually Free Of Charge
Most of the hosted blogging partform such as blogger or wordpress are free to use.
-The Many Available Plugins
Hosted blogging platform such as wordpress contain many kind of plugins which helps to increase the search engine ranking of your wordpress blog, and helps to improve the overall of your blog as a whole.
-Ease Of Setting Up
Hosted blogging platforms usually comes with a basic default template, and there are many different types of wonderful templates available for you to choose from. Little or nothing is needed to know about blogging skills, most of them are user friendly along with guidelines.
-Fast Index In Search Engines
Most of the hosted blogging platform already have good page ranking thus, bloggers of such hosted blogging platforms will have an advantage of getting their blogs index in search engines and a higher page ranking in google.

Cons Of Hosted Blogging Platform
-Less control over your blog
Bloggers on such hosted blogging platform usually have less control over their own blogs as compared to standalone sites bloggers. There are certain times when such hosted blogging plateform break down and causes much trouble for everyone. Ultimately, bloggers of such hosted blogging platforms are more disadvantage as compared to those on standalone sites.
-No sense of Professionalism
A domain name will help to provide readers with a sense of professionalism and credibility as compared to a blogspot URL.

Pros Of StandAlone Blogging Sites
-Sense of Professionalism
As previously mentioned before, a generic URL gives readers and visitors a sense of professionalism and credibility.
-Design it the way you want
With your own site, you can choose whatever designs you want to do with your site. Unlike blogger, the amount of templates to choose from are limited, whereas for your own site, you could either manually create a wonderful designs or choose some templates available from online.

Cons Of Having StandAlone Blogging Sites
-Having essential knowledge of Html and Css
Setting up of your own site with the design that you want is not easy. There are many complicated setups and steps and it isnt easy doing it individually. Normally, most webmasters would require the help of other professional designers in this area and they do come with a cost. However, to fully manage your blog on your own, it is necessary to possess certain technical skills.
-Costs
Domain names and webhosting dont come at a very cheap price. Furthermore, as your traffic increases, the price of the plan do go up as well. If you are not generating enough revenue from your site, you would be making a loss for the cost of these domain names and webhosting.
-Securing both .com and .net
Why should you do so? In any case, if your blog gets popular, others might just want to secure the .net version of your site and get better indexed in google, this would then be a threat to your business. Again, if you would secure both .com and .net,  there would be even more cost for the domain names and webhosting.

So, what should you choose? A hosted blogging platform or a standalone blogging platform?

Generally, for bloggers who are blogging for the sake of fun, not for business purposes, i suggest going for a hosted blogging platform. They provide many basic templates to choose from and setting up is easy, publishing a post and setting up of adsense could be done with just a few minutes too.
Whereas, for bloggers who are blogging for business purposes, I would suggest going for a standalone blogging platform as they provide a sense of professionalism and gives the blogger total control over what he want with his site.

Reason why I stick with Blogger
Firstly, i know nothing about HTML, CSS and stuffs.
Next, i dont have the money to afford the cost of having a domain name and webhosting although it's not that expensive and i wasnt sure whether the revenue that I was able to earn from my site are enough to overcome the costs of the webhosting and domain fees.
Not to mention about securing the both the .com and .net for my sites, they come with a cost as well.
Thus, I choose to stick with blogger. I have a great template to work with, and I am convinced that any site with great content, good keywords and other factors is able to earn good amount of money from Adsense, affiliate programs etc