The primary benefit of using a hosted blogging platform is that you don't have to pay for hosting. This is ideal for beginning users as well as anybody who needs more time and freedom to play around with the blog or website before they make a financial commitment.
Whatever your reason to go for a hosted solution, there are several providers of this service to choose from. This list is arranged in a reverse order – starting from the ones that are least known and going down to blogging world stars.
1. Drupal Gardens
Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems. However, as a CMS, it's available as a self-hosted product. You need to have your own server or rent some space on one to practice some web design and website development with Drupal.
This has changed recently. Drupal Gardens was launched to provide a free hosted website building platform. It's not a solution designed specifically for blogging but it allows to customize a website to take advantage of all the great blogging capabilities.
It's an interesting location for a blog, but writers will need some patience before more templates and automated features are developed. Mapping to a custom domain is available for premium users.
2. Posterous
Dubbing its elegantly designed blogs spaces, Posterous allows its bloggers to feature diverse web content and share it easily. It's for anyone who blogs a lot but their entries are not purely text-based, but play around with photos, links and social media.
You can customize your space to fit your personality and style thanks to multiple themes and gadgets. Without much effort, you can create a sleek web location to show to your friends and strangers. It has great mobile and social media support.
Mapping to a custom domain is available.
3. Tumblr
Tumblr stands out from the rest of the blogging systems due to its focus on simplicity and speed of publication. This makes it a great platform to blog a lot but in shorter communication formats.
Sharing and networking is also easy and exciting. A fully-fledged platform, Tumblr gives users an abundance of themes and other customization options, which are designed in an intuitive way.
Mapping to a custom domain is available.
4. Wordpress
With its robust community of addict bloggers, Wordpress plays in a league of its own. Importantly, it offers a great number of powerful plugins ideally suited to the needs of the blogosphere. If you're looking to join the blogging buzz, there is no better way platform to make it happen.
Wordpress CMS has been streamlined and optimized to the point where anybody with any willingness to create a decent-looking blog can achieve it in very little time. It comes with an integrated anti-spam software Akimset, an army of widgets and much more.
Mapping to a custom domain is available as a paid service. Wordpress is also available as a self-hosted platform.
5. Blogspot
Google's Blogspot (also known as Blogger) is a direct competitor to Wordpress with its general purpose, highly flexible and insanely user-friendly platform. If you have a Google account, you are about a minute away from setting up a great-looking blog. If you don't, it might take you half a minute longer.
Customizing Blogger beyond what is doable directly in its CMS is a breeze too considering its endless user base that publishes tutorials and guides like crazy. Whatever you want to achieve with your blog, type it in your search engine and somebody will take you through the process. You feel like a blogging expert from day one.
Mapping to a custom domain is available and free. Blogger has the lowest downtime rates of all the hosted blogging platforms.