5 Free Blog Platforms for 2014

Postach.io

Postach.io is a free blog service powered by Evernote. When you first sign up, you will get redirected to Evernote to create an account. At first, I was a bit confused, and kept looking for a link to “write new post” at Postach.io, then I found out you have to write a new note at Evernote, tag it as “published”, and your blog at Postach.io will be updated. Wouldn’t it be better if they can add a “write new post” button at Postach.io, and then the system sync the content with your account at Evernote? Anyway, the basic features include a “Discover” function to find new friends, an import sharing function with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogspot, and a choice of 14 free themes. For a $50 annual premium subscription, you get additional features like multiple sites, secure sites, multiple authors, and also a free t-shirt!

Sett

Sett’s free blogging plan is pretty basic, you don’t have much features to play with, like you don’t have any free themes to choose from, but you still have the options to change your blog font, colour, background and header image. The “Online Users” feature is quite interesting, you can check which members are viewing your blog in real time. If you want better features, you are required to subscribe one of the paid blogging plans – Hobbyist ($12/month), Leader ($19/month), and Enterprise ($99/month). You get “Switchable Themes” with the Hobbyist plan, and “Full Custom Theming”, “Sidebar”, “Broadcast Emails” with the Leader plan.

Roon

Roon is perfect for those who want a minimalist blog design. You have 2 font styles to select and an option to change your blog accent colour. And paid options include custom domain name ($12/year) and analytics function ($12/year). Hopefully, more features will come up in later development.

ggfinances

ggfinances is a blogging platform, which specializes in the financial field. Their blog platform offers a wide variety of financial tools such as ticker, chart, quote, market indexes, and currency converter. It’s a bit different from your regular blogging platforms. To get started, click “Learn How” on the top navigation bar to find out more.

Ghost

Ghost is free only if you plan to download the software and run it yourself, otherwise, there is a monthly usage fee. Available plans are Mini ($5/month, 1 blog, 10k views/month), Small ($14/month, 5 blogs, 50k views/month), Medium ($36/month, 15 blogs, 150k views/month), and Large ($80/month, 30 blogs, 500k views/month). Ghost is not yet available for the general shared hosting environment such as Hostgator, a VPS setup is recommended. Many users tend to recommend DigitalOcean which offers an entry level package – 512M memory, 1 core processor, 20GB SSD disk, and 1TB transfer, all for $5/month.

Here are few new blog platforms which requires a small monthly fee: Postagon – $4.99/month, Posthaven – $5/month, Silvrback – $29.99/year.

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