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@emma-walker A blog runs through a program called Content Management Software (CMS). CMS has to run on some computer somewhere for a user to access the posts created with it. This computer is called a “server,” because it serves up its files to people who ask for them by typing in the right address.

Any computer can be a server if it’s set up the right way, but this can be very, very hard to do yourself if you aren’t familiar with networking, and you would need to keep that server running twenty-four hours a day if you want people to be able to connect to it at any time. Additionally, someone who for whatever reason wanted to cause you trouble could take your site down for a while by performing a DDOS attack, where so many requests are sent to your server that it can’t handle them and crashes.

Some companies like Siteground (the one I use) own many, many servers, and they let you rent some space on one of their servers instead of hosting one yourself. You can install many kinds of software on the server you rent, and a lot of it’s free. For example, I have both WordPress and Mediawiki (Wikipedia’s software) installed on my server space, and neither of them cost me anything.

The benefits of this are that your site will be up almost 100% of the time (except for routine maintenance and occasional bugs), that you can talk to support professionals about major issues you have, and that your host company is very well protected against DDOS attacks.

The downside is you need to pay a subscription fee for both your service and the cost of the domain name you’ll use.

For example, if you wanted the cheapest Siteground hosting option (which is good for sites which will receive about 10,000 or fewer visitors a month), you’d pay $15 a month (a year at a time) as well as the $15 a year to be able to use, for example, emmawalker . com as your address, so long as no one is able to use it. You’d also probably want the Domain ID Protect service for an additional $12 a year, which is necessary if you don’t want anyone to be able to see your real life street address.

In short, the convenience of professional service through Siteground would cost you roughly $200 a year, paid all at once.

There are other paid options, too. Bluehost has a plan that only costs $9 a month, but you have to buy it three years at a time.

There are free alternatives, too, but they’re much more limited. WordPress . com lets you use the WordPress software for free on their site, but you can’t install plugins, can’t remove ads, and can’t monetize your site. Wix and Squarespace are also popular sites which let you run CMS software for free, but they have some similar limitations.

Most importantly, these free sites don’t come with a domain name, so you’d be sending people to emmawalker . wordpress . com instead of emmawalker . com.

If creating content people will see is your only concern, a free option is probably fine. If you’re willing to put in the effort to learn web mastering, the control you can gain from unlimited access to your CMS software can be powerful and rewarding. For example, storyembers runs on the WordPress software, even though it’s much more than just a blog. That’s not possible to achieve through the free hosting version of WordPress. If you go to taylorclogston . com, you’ll see my heavily customized and very different installation of WordPress, which is much cleaner-looking and much faster-loading than it could have been if I’d used the free version of WordPress.