Host your blog for free using Blogger platform

Hosting providers are not always reliable, and easy to deal with.

• Hosting directly determines the space available for the website
• Hosting speed directly makes or breaks the website. The amount of memory and CPU, when restricted or throttled, is a bad thing for the website
• Hosting costs money. Not all blogs make money from day one, and if you don't have a solid business plan on how your website/blog is going to earn you money, you are going to spend that from your pocket for quite sometime (or for all times)

Here comes Google to the rescue. Blogspot/Blogger platform are not known as the best blogging platforms out there, but it has many advantages:

1. Space: A lot of space if you are not into uploading a lot of pictures or videos (there are work around solutions for that - some other post, some other time). Pictures get 1 GB of space, which is also shared with your Picasa web albums
2. Supported by Google infrastructure: Blogs are fast. Chances are they are also nearer to you than your standard hosting provider (technosanct.blogspot.com gets redirected to technosanct.blogspot.in if you are in India, treatment is same with other countries with sizable users). I have never really worried about CPU/memory utilization for my email, document editing or for blogs

Setup

The setup is fairly easy. Refer to instructions provided by Google. The instructions are specific in some places to a few domain registrars (like Godaddy, 1and1). Below are a few additional tips.

1. If your registrar allows it, import the DNS file provided by Google. This will merge all the required records in the DNS file maintained by your registrar. You can skip to the last step from here.
2. If the above is not the case, go to 'Domain Manager' in your registrar site (e.g. godaddy.com > Login > Domains > DNS Zone File). You should see a section called "CNAME". Create two records here:
• Add new. Enter 'www' against 'Name' and 'ghs.google.com' as destination. If there is already a record with 'www' as Name, you would have to edit it
• Add new. Enter your unique code against 'Name' (for e.g. abcdefgh) and applicable server against 'Destination' (e.g. xxxx.dv.googlehosted.com). This is provided by Google in the Settings page of your blog
3. Locate 'A' section/name after you have entered CNAMES. Create four records here for the below IP addresses in the 'Destination' field. 'Name' will have '@', leave that default value be. These values help redirect to WWW URLs. For e.g. http://technosanct.com will redirect to http://www.technosanct.com
• 216.239.32.21
• 216.239.34.21
• 216.239.36.21
• 216.239.38.21
4. Once you have setup the domain successfully, wait for sometime (10 minutes to an entire day ) for the DNS name change to get propagated. Go back to Settings page of your blog. Enter custom domain information, and save. If there is any problem with any of the above steps or if you have not allowed for domain names to get propagated as relevant, Google will show an error. Otherwise you are all set!

Limitations

Well, there are going to be limitations here as is the case of anything in life. Google is no hosting nirvana.

• First and foremost, the platform is not known to be beautiful or powerful. Dead links are not inherently detected, there is not much freedom with how the layout and UI look and behave, not many tools to help you with tasks like SEO
• The max. size of a page is restricted to 1 MB. Although there is no size or post limit right now, there is no guarantee that it is supported for life
• Google can change policies or discontinue tools (I still miss Google Reader!)

See a complete list of what can or cannot be be done on Blogger.