They have finally made it into the mainstream awareness of the internet community at large. In fact, it seems like there are blog communities for everything now and everyone from teens to grandparents have their own blog.

We know what they are but what is more of a grey area is is deciding precisely the weblog host to use and whether you should go with a paid or freebie service. There are really numerous no-cost providers in existense, and typically they have everything most bloggers will require.

Much depends on whether you are going to use your weblog for a commercial venture or if you plan on using it only as a personal blog.

If you plan to use it for the latter, then really virtually any free blog hosting service should work alright.

Certain blog providers that have very simple set-up features include Bloglines.com (an enormous blogging community where submissions are unlimited), Blogdrive.com (also very easy to use) and 20six.co.uk which is based in England but may be used for free by anyone anywhere.

They have a quick set-up. As a matter of fact, they claim to get you 'blogging within 2 minutes'! And there are indeed a plethera other free blog hosts which can also do the job for the personal blogger including blogtiger.com, myspivo.com, jcsearch.com and also blogsome.com.

Now if you are going to build a commercial blog, then you will want to consider a different set of factors altogether.

If you plan to monetize your blog with Adsense, as an example, then Blogspot.com may be your best bet. They are one of the oldest blog hosts as well as being one of the easier ones to use, plus they have a convinient feature which inserts your adsense code into the page template at the push of a button so that every page you create automatically runs your adsense ad, and it will customize the shape and color of the ad to fit your particular webpage.

And you probably already are aware that adsense already customizes the actual ad word copy to fit the text subject matter of your site.

These features let you concentrate fully on creating you blog and not hassling with all the little technical details you usually have to deal with. Blogspot has a lot of the web creation tools you will require for a business blog.

You can also easily change the web templates to match your style and/or color preferences, and there are many options available in that arena. They are thus a top choice. I can also recommend blurty.com which is also quite simple to set up, with no major technical knowledge needed.

They also do not put any ads on your weblog so you can run your own ads without all the competition.

There is no limit to the number of blog pages and they automatically make your website url's a live link.

Other quality free blog hosts include bloghorn.com, tonguewag.com and messagemonster.com.