Hosting a professional blog on your own domain can be done for free in variety of ways. There are 3 major common blogging options I want to discuss here, that you can use for your own custom paid domain, without paying for the hosting portion.

Blogger: This is google’s free blogspot hosting. Blogger now allows you to purchase a domain and point it to your existing free blogspot blog. There are times when it’s useful to use a free blog host like Blogger for your own domain. For example, if your new to blogging you may not understand how to use a real host where you must understand how to backup your database and files, learn Cpanel, install web software, and all the other complexities of runnning it on your own paid webhost. Registering a domain and configuring it to the blogger servers isn’t that complex, as they give a tutorial for how to do it for each domain registrar service. The downside to blogger hosting is that you won’t have an easy way to backup your information and their blogging software is extremely limited.

Using blogger’s free hosting on a paid domain can also be useful for when your letting a site mature in the search engines. It takes months for a site to work itself up in the search engines and you may not want to purchase hosting for that domain, until it gets enough traffic to warrant paid hosting. I used to do this with new sites and let them mature for about 3-5 months, until I bought Hostgator’s Baby plan. I really like how Hostgator’s baby plan allows me to host unlimited domains under one plan for a good price. I immediately now put new sites under my current hosting plan because I don’t have to worry anymore about paying extra each time I start a new site.

Wordpress: Wordpress is the most popular blogging software on the internet. The company can also host your blogs for free at Wordpress.com. The major problem with their free hosting option, is they don’t allow any advertising. They also charge 17 dollars a year if you want to use a custom domain to your free wordpress.com blog. I don’t see any point with paying for a domain to point to a free hosted wordpress.com blog. If you decide to purchase your own web hosting, I highly recommend using the wordpress blogging software.

Free Hosting web services: There is many different free web hosting services. They come in many shapes and forms. Some come with the web administration software Cpanel, but most aren’t that fancy. Usually they have many different restraints on file size uploads, bandwith, languages, and database. Most of the free hosts also display banner ads, which effectively cuts into your own advertising revenue. Many people report that the sites are also slow or constantly down. My advice is if you are going to go to the hassle of learning how to use these free hosts, you might as well buck up a few bucks a month and get a real paid host.

If you are looking for a place to buy a domain to point to your free blog host, I recommend GoDaddy