Some say it is human nature to go for options that avoid incurrence of charges, or preferring to try out something first before being charged for it.

Blogging has sort of become a way of life in this world. It is how people all over the world share their thoughts, ideas and opinions on any topic they could think of.

New blogs come up every day and most likely a new blogger would not want to always incur monthly hosting charges (which is common for most hosting sites) for his/her site, and good thing is, they actually don’t have to, thanks to Heroku and Amazon (hosting sites popular for their reliable free tier of at least a year). Among the many advantages of word press, it can be deployed on both but either has its pros and cons.

Heroku pros

• It has a free tier (probably the best pro 😛 )
• Zerigo provides an excellent DNS service for custom domain via the Zerigo DNS add-on

Heroku Cons

• Out of every 24 hours, the free tier has to sleep for 6 hours (So a site would be down for a continuous 6 hours)
• Installation of themes and plugins is abit tedious because they have to be installed locally then manually pushed to the Heroku file system.
• As much as its free though, it is not as powerful as the paid version and there are some features that the paid version has and the free one doesn’t.

Amazon pros

• (As usual I’ll start with what we’d want to hear) It’s free for a year.
• Installation of themes and plugins is not manual. It can be done via the admin panel. (another one of my all-time favorites)
• The site is always online 😀

Amazon cons

• Manual set-up of php, MySQL and WordPress (done only once though so it is not such major con).
• Handling of software updates
• Server maintenance (which is actually not as hard as it might sound because the server is virtual).
• Amazon’s free tier is also limited in performance compared to the paid version.

Personally I’d go for AWS (amazon). Its pros outweigh its cons and it doesn’t require so much handiwork, so someone doesn’t really have to be an IT guru to use it. I’ve used it and so far so good, it has not disappointed.

So for any new/ upcoming bloggers out there, there’s a really cheap and reliable way to begin.