My first challenge was to figure out where to post these initial articles. Therefore, as I often do, I started with Wikipedia. I found the following article “Comparison of free blog hosting services.” Wow! Doesn’t that sounds promising! …
What a letdown! At the time of this writing the article only listed the following providers: Blogger, Tumblr, Weebly, Wix.com, WordPress.com, and Twitter. Twitter is certainly not what I have in mind for this blog. WordPress.com was kind of at the top of my mind already, but I took a brief look at the others, as well.
It took me all of about ten minutes to figure out that I would not be happy with any of them. Wix.com looks like it might be sufficient for my purposes, but I do not get the impression that you get a whole lot for free. The problem is the cost of their subscription services. The most inexpensive plan that they have is $13.00/month. This is a lot of money for a service that comes with so many restrictions. I am sure that it would be appropriate for certain people, but not for me.
A simple Google search yielded better results. I found a number of useful articles, which included mentions of a few more novel takes on the concept of Blogging: Medium, Penzu, Postach.io, and Jimdo. I, also, found mentions of free Blogging/Web-builder tools that were included in these reviews alongside with hosting providers. Here is one of the things that makes technology so difficult for everyone (newbies and the experienced alike).
I found several articles whose titles spoke of free hosting, but then the list of solutions provided include items that do not have free hosting. Free tools, yes … but not free hosting! How confusing to read an article with a list of ten different providers with free hosting, only to find out that three of them do not actually have free hosting as an offering! Why are they included in the article? These things should be in a soapbox or a feature! I find this phenomenon more often than not. There are so many variations between products and solutions that it can be difficult for an expert to separate the apples from the oranges. Even if the author understands the difference, they may not do such a good job of making that differentiation to the reader. (Recently I made this same mistake myself. What a mess!)
This is my advice: Be careful what you read, and read it carefully. Make sure you understand what are apples and what are oranges. Sometimes this is easier said than done.
After a bit of perusing and reading, I did find two providers that offer free conventional Web site hosting where one might build a lightweight Web site more or less to their liking: x10hosting.com and 000webhost.com. At first, I thought I might go with one of the two, but after some consideration I realized that it would be very unlikely that I would stick with either of the two, long term. Therefore, I did not see much of an advantage to investing a great deal of effort setting up a Blog site that I am most likely going to move somewhere else. (I have no idea how I even want to set up my Blog yet. In all probability, I would need to rebuild my Blog at the same time I was moving it somewhere else.)
With that in mind, I took another look at Medium. It seems to have most of the features that I am looking for, to serve as an interim location for my Blog posts. As a newbie, I am not looking for extensive functionality. I just need a place to post my writings. Who knows? I could still be posting to Medium a couple years down the road.
I wish I could spend a little more time assessing and analyzing it all, but I need to get back to the real question at hand, “How do I host my own Blog site?” Let us see if I ever figure it out.