The WordPress blogging platform, by its sheer popularity, is believed by many to be the best blogging software available. Certainly, over the last few years, the popularity of blogging has mushroomed – it seems that everyone is blogging, including some of the largest corporations in the world.

Among the many blogging software choices available, WordPress is by far the most popular.  We’ll look at the reasons for that in a few moments, but first let’s clarify the differences between the two main categories of blogging software:

1. Hosted blogs refer to those blogging platforms that are hosted for us by other companies on their servers. Two examples of hosted solutions are Blogger.com and WordPress.com.

2. Self-hosted blogs refer to those blogs which we set up ourselves by downloading blogging software such as WordPress (from WordPress.org) or Movable Type, and installing the blog software on the servers of our own web hosting company.

So in the case of hosted blogs, you simply go to their site, create an account, choose a template from their selection, and start blogging. The main advantage of hosted blogs is that they’re free and simple to use. The primary disdvantage is that their features – that is, what you’re able to do with them and what you can add to them – are very limited.

On the other hand, while self-hosted blogs are not free, the fees are quite reasonable and they have tremendous feature advantages over hosted blogs. You also have sole and complete control over when and how to implement the many features available. While the tradeoff is that you must also manage all the behind-the-scenes actions and issues, including software upgrades, most consider this tradeoff well worth the effort.

Some further clarification. Note that the hosted version of WordPress is found at WordPress.com, while the self-hosted (i.e. downloadable) version of WordPress is located at WordPress.org. At WordPress.com, you create your free blog on WordPress’s servers, and they maintain control over what limited feature set and templates to make available to you. At WordPress.org, you would download the software and install it on a web host of your choice, at your expense, but you maintain full control over your blog.

With respect to self-hosted blogging solutions, the advantages that WordPress has over other offerings (such as MovableType) are numerous:

1. WordPress is completely free. MovableType has several levels varying from free to very pricey.

2. WordPress is ‘open source’. This not only means that it will remain free, but that its source code is readily available to developers all over the world, enabling them to enhance the functionality of WordPress by developing such things as themes and plugins (feature-enriching modules).

As a result, there are thousands of feature-enhancing plugins and crisp colorful themes from which to choose. In fact, the choices are so many and varied that the process of selecting a theme from the thousands available, for instance, can be quite overwhelming.

While there really is no substitute for the self-hosted blogging platform, many bloggers actually use both the hosted and self-hosted solutions. When used properly, hosted blogs that are complementary to our self-hosted blogs can provide a ranking boost. We’ll talk about the SEO benefits to using blogs in an upcoming article, so watch for it.