THE Best Places to Start a Blog (Updated 2015 Edition)

Note: We’ve just published a quick guide to blog hosting sites. Make sure to get those details if you haven’t already!

Blogging. The thing your friend does that you could do better. The hobby of the century. Your key to boss-less freedom and your cat’s one shot at fame. So do your homework with this list and start a blog the whole world, and your mom, will love.

Browse :

• WordPress Setup nowadays so easy Snoop Dogg can do it with the elegance of NYTimes, Sony PlayStation, Wall Street Journal, Paris Hilton and more. WordPress requires no coding knowledge and is free software – it’s the domain name and hosting you pay about-as-much-as-a-cup-of-coffee-per-month for. It gives you a website like the world’s best and teaches you all about websites, too. For countless bloggers who do this for a living, WordPress.org is the best place to blog. Click here to watch our step-by-step setup video and join the largest blogging community on the web.
• WordPress
• Blogger
• Tumblr
• SquareSpace
• Plus.Google
• Wix
• Medium
• HubPages
• Joomla
• LiveJournal
• Quora
• Typepad
• Weebly
• Drupal
• Squidoo
• Postach
• Facebook
• Svbtle
• Sett
• Ghost
• Posthaven
• Blog
• Zoomshare

The End?

Hardly. But drum roll, now it’s your turn. If you’ve got anything to add, drop it in the comments right below.

Lastly, this post took me months to research and make. So if you know a friend who could benefit, why not send this to them? Just send an email. I’ll let you steal my work :)

Thanks and cheers!

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Blog.com

Browse at Blog.com

• Recommended for: Blogging
• Founded: 2004
• Founders: ?
• Total users: 2 million
• Pros: Free themes, multi-author blogging, social media widgets, video
• Cons: Less customization
• Premium features: Your own domain name, advertising network
• Costs: ?
• My verdict: You’d hope a domain name as strong as blog.com would produce a winner…

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Posthaven

Browse as Posthaven.com

• Founded: Early 2013
• Founder: Ghost Foundation
• Total users: 10,000 – 50,000
• Pros: Post by email. Oh and “they’ll never get acquired, never shut down” as long as you pay them.
• Cons: “Simple, easy blogs for $5 a month, forever.”
• Costs: 5 bucks
• My verdict: They’re a group of engineers who want to build blogs for us. Love this idea and wish them the best. But as a company you just can’t get ahead in an open environment like blogging by trying to control things, at least not upfront. Their technology might be great and “durable” but most of us will never know, because their marketing is a zero and their homepage design is really weak.

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Ghost

Browse at Ghost.org

• Founded: Early 2013
• Founder: Ghost Foundation
• Total users: 10,000 – 50,000
• Pros: Open-source so once you download it you own it, organized at run by volunteers and non-profits
• Cons: Any service that charges based on the amount of views you get is a villain in my book or could become one. Don’t limit us, thanks.
• Costs: Free with premium service offered
• My verdict: Got to respect their lofty ideas. But, I suspect they are trying to KO WordPress and possibly backed by BlueHost based on their web design, so I oppose

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Sett

Browse at Sett.com

• Founded: Early 2013
• Founder: Tynan (a blogger) and Todd Iceton
• Total users: 1,000 – 10,000
• Pros: Generally bent on community, top navigation bar like Blogger, has a word-matching system that matches similar posts and will recommend users to your posts the moment they sign-up, private discussions, one click subscription system
• Cons: Premium service that allows for more image hosting (does this mean normal users are limited?)
• Costs: Free with premium service offered
• My verdict: I’ve always believed it’s the readers who really grow a blog, not so much the blogger him/herself. 80/20. So I’m excited here. Will they win the battle for 3rd place? Either way, the web is always better with more variety, more options, more places to blog.

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Svbtle

Browse at Svbtle.com

• Founded: 2013
• Founder: Dustin Curtis
• Total users: ?
• Pros: New, different; aren’t we all?
• Cons: Must apply for a membership and no commenting feature as of yet.
• Costs: Free
• My verdict: They are a “network of great people who want to make it easier for people to share and discover new ideas”. Excited to see where Svbtle goes in the next few months.

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Facebook Notes

Browse at Facebook.com/notes

• Recommended for: Social media integrated blogging
• Founded: 2013
• Founder: Facebook Developers
• Total users: Well, 1.1 billion already on Facebook…
• Pros: Simple to share images, links and quotes – useful if you’ve got a large, Facebook-centric audience already.
• Cons: Limited design and that blue Facebook-y feel we all should just escape every now and then.
• Costs: Free
• My verdict: Not much different from a Facebook page – I predict this to be a feature Facebook tries, directs advertisers to, then slowly wanders away from.

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Postach.io

Browse at Postach.io

• Recommended for: On-the-go bloggers, note-taking
• Founded: 2013
• Founder: Evernote
• Total users: 20,000
• Pros: Supports popular comment plugin Disqus, lighter feel, easy to use.
• Cons: Less costumization
• Costs: Free
• My verdict: Too soon to form a verdict here!

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Squidoo

Browse at Squidoo.com

• Founded: 2005
• Founder: Seth Godin
• Total users: 1.5 million
• Pros: Lenses and points systems to level up are only part of the fun.
• Cons: Like Hubpages, you might not feel an ownership of your work.
• Costs: Free
• My verdict: A classy place to meet others before you get more serious about blogging.

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Drupal

Browse at Drupal.org

• Recommended for: Blogging, Content Management, Web Applications
• Founded: January 2001
• Founder: Dries Buytaert
• Total users: 1 million users and 30K developers
• Pros: 22,900 free add-ons, free and premium themes via the Drupal Theme Garden
• Cons: Quite involved, not ideal for beginners
• Costs: ?
• My verdict: Fun for developers and bloggers with a real interest in building code.

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