It has been around two years now since Bothack was started and it has come a long way through. A few months back the site reached the half a million mark and it is still getting stronger. One thing which i have repented from the beginning is not moving Bothack to a hosted domain. Once you get some sort of establishment it becomes very hard to move on a to a hosted domain and then divert all the traffic and the readership which you have built putting in a lot of hard work. I would strongly advise any one who wants to make it big to start off with a hosted domain as it has lots of advantages.

- Branding becomes very easy and it is one of the major factors for pulling traffic. yourname.com or something.com is more attractive than yourname.something.com.
- You can tweak your blog in what ever way you want and host third party ads and generate some revenue which will not be possible if you running on a free domain.
- Generally hosted domains are more search engine friendly and nothing can match a wordpress hosted domain as it comes with lots of features and plugins which you can use.

While deciding on your host a few things need to be checked such as the uptime, support for the latest versions of SQL, PHP etc. A mysql web hosting solution will enable you to create a separate database for each web domain which you own.
So decide on now and don’t repent later but i would definitely not say that you can’t flourish in blogging with a free host and there are some exceptional cases.