When it comes to starting an online business, whether you’re going to open something elaborate like internet casinos or just something simple like a traffic-driven PPC site offering fresh content, the debate wages on about whether to use a free hosting service with readymade features like a blog or a more detail-oriented standalone hosting service giving you a legitimate website.

Which one better suits your needs – a real website or a gussied up free server?

For most people, it depends on their particular needs. If you’re only going after traffic for PPC ads and affiliate links, then any old thing with fresh content will do. However, if you’re going to attempt to sell any product, to have a professional look, to have a user-friendly interface and easy-to-load features, then having a real website is by far the better investment. And here’s why.

Sure, something “free” stands out above everything else. But like the saying goes, you get exactly what you pay for. Using a free blog limits you to the scripts and other add-ons that particular service allows. So if you wanted to setup an eBook business, for example, your shopping cart options are limited on a blog, as well as your separate pages and downloadable features.

With a real website hosted on a real server, having multiple payment processing options is simple to do and usually included in the most basic of packages. Plus you can set up legitimate pages for each product, reviews, and landing pages and you won’t have to tweak the HTML to turn a “post” into a page.

Then there’s the issue of your site actually being found. Blogs, even well-designed blogs with real domains, circulate mostly around the blogosphere. Web servers, on the other hand, submit your site and its pages to multiple directories for you, and they’re always easily found. Simply put, you won’t have to work as hard to drive traffic to a real website.

Blogs are great for hosting games if you want to give your visitors something to keep them busy. You can throw in an online baccarat game with no problem. However, it comes out looking like a blog post, plus you have to again tweak the HTML to get the right parameters and to make sure the game doesn’t load and play before activated. It’s a task requiring time and knowledge of computer code.

With a web host, you’ll receive drag-and-drop template builders, so anything you want to add can simply be dragged to the location and dropped in neatly, with a hundred times more script options to choose from.

A business is going to be an investment, so it’s always a better idea to pay a few bucks for a real website than to spend months on end trying to recode a blog template to become a faux site. And at the end of the day, your efforts are for naught if you want to actually sell something, because blogs are simply limited.