New Blogger - A Good Hosted Service

If you want to get started quickly, I recommend using New Blogger. It's free, easy to use and hosted by Google.

Being new to blogging and not being very techie, I didn't want to spend time learning how to program. Luckily, I quickly found Blogger, now New Blogger, which had predesigned templates to use. After signing up for Blogger, I was able to quickly choose a design and start blogging on My Wealth Builder.

Since then I have learned, Blogger is called a hosted service. A hosted service or developer service provides the server, software and blog templates, requiring no software installation by the blogger. Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of developer services.

I did not do an evaluation of the different hosting services before choosing Blogger. I experimented first with Blogger and found it sufficient for my needs of no investment, simplicity and quick start. The additional benefits of Blogger are that it is associated with Google (which may make one's blog more easily searched), and there are a wide range of templates to use. The downside is that one has to learn some programming to customize the templates to get, for example, a three column blog format.

I think the other hosted services are also very good. I just haven't tried them and can't comment on them from personal experience.