If you decide to start your own blog for whatever reason, you should have one huge thing in mind: there are millions of people like you blogging about the same things you will blog about (that is unless it’s your life, thus a personal blog). So this means that, if you plan to start a blog that would eventually start generating some income and you’re not only doing it to let your friends know what you’re doing, you’re up for a risk: the risk of NOT BEING READ. The risk of not being able to make your way ahead of the other thousands of people posting at the same time with you.

Although the general rule of blogging applies here (and that is “work hard, work harder and keep on going”) the truth is that there’s quite a chance you won’t succeed. That others will be better than you and you should find some new things to blog about. Or, on the contrary, fall in love with the topic you’re blogging about and carry on doing that no matter if you gain money or not.

But have in mind another thing: the general golden rule of thumb is that the regular blog only lasts for at most three months before the author loses interest from one reason or another. However, the majority of hosting companies only allow the purchase of at least one year of hosting. So if you, from whatever reason, lose interest in your blog, you won’t get your money back. And let me tell you something: during these troubled times, you wouldn’t want to waste any money, would you?

So the whole point when starting a blog would be to minimize the risks. Minimize the losses. No matter if you want to simply test the ground with the niche you’re choosing or if you want to see that you’ll still be interested in that niche four months after, the best thing for a start up blogger to do would be to go for a free hosting plan! And yes, such a plan exists, as I have found out by myself.

There is a company in this huge world, Freehostia, that indeed offers a free hosting plan for your website or blog, without imposing the use of ads/banners or other similar things. In other words, you get your own blog for absolutely no charge and you can see if it’s worth upgrading to a paid server or not.

Because, as soon as your blog gets popular (the main reason behind keeping you going, right?) the free hosting offered by Freehostia will no longer be enough since it can’t compare with the paid hosting offers, but the good thing is that you can easily move to a paid and better server with just the press of a button. So what would you have to lose? NOTHING!

And that rarely happens in the competitive blogging world today, where thousands of blogs are started every day (and even more are dying of inactivity at the same time). However, if you pay nothing for the services and you get a free testing period, it’s perfect and you won’t be one of those ruined by the server costs. So be smart and if you are just starting, head over to the Freehostia website, get your free hosting plan and start blogging for free (you’ll have to go for their “Chocolate” plan and, however, pay for your domain name if you don’t have one).

NOTE: I am in no way connected with Freehostia and I am not even using a referral to get some money if you decide to use their services or not. Actually, I just found out about them recently and considered they are doing a great thing – something you can’t get anywhere else, so I thought I should share. And I doubt there are many people doing such things nowadays so yes, this was your lucky day!