Finding free yet flexible blog platform solution isn’t that easy. It’s get more harder when someone seeks a blog integrated with lot of other stuffs yet easy to handle, easy to customize and most importantly free. There are quite a few free solution that provide excellent service together with quality, looks like Terapad.com just join in that list. Terapad.com is now free, which was previously paid blog platform at it’s early stage of launching. The coolest part is they are offering a lot more then just a blog.

Terapad.com which is owned by UK based SiteJourney Ltd. during it’s early launch last year used be $18/month subscription fees. But from January 2nd, 2007 they announced it to be free. Though it is ad supported (only one column ad in the sidebar), but easily can be removed by $5/month and additional 10GB bandwith. The key features of Terapad.com–

• 10 GB bandwith and 2 GB storage limit. In a close interview with Terapad’s Managing Director Stephan Tual, I came to know that if any blogger cross the limits (which is highly unlikely), they will take it into consideration depending the activity of blogger (Spammer precaution you can say).
• You can integrate built in static web pages, Job board, image gallery, even calendar, forums and online shop integrated with PayPal with just a few clicks.
• Full WYSIWYG editing with ability to play around with CSS for altering your blogs layouts.
• For static pages you have full scale CMS authoring capabilities.
• Initially when you sign up the blog(site) hosted in Terapad.com’s sub-domain, but through centralize control panel you can always change it to any URL/domain you own. That is free too.
• There are 6 preset theme for Terapad, but you can always modify or build your own theme as you have full control over it.
• Your content your rule, you retain full ownership of the material you publish. You can remove or modify your content anytime you wish.
• You can transform your blog into multi-authored blog and set level to users according to role.
• Built in spam protection and ability to moderate comments.
• You can integrate additional 3rd party items/tools via code snippet from setting in control panel. Things can not get easier then this.

(Double click on the picture to see the full picture in new window.)

In past years I have seen lot of CMS/blog platforms came into action, some of them are free to just like Terapad, but only hand full of them really manages to offer consumer something resourceful yet flexible. The biggest problem of most of the free blog publishing platform is low or no customer service, poorly documented guide/help. On the contrary i found Terapad’s help very self explanatory and helpful, and there customer service seems prompt. 

Question is can they maintain like this and continue to develop Terapad along with the advancement and needs? If they can maintain that, my score for Terapad as a free hosted solution, 8 out of 10. Couldn’t give the rest of the two point as the shop is pretty useless if the blogger don’t have a PayPal business or premier account. Except for that i am truly satisfied with performance of Terapad, they have done an excellent job so far. Honestly a lot of popular hosted blog platform don’t even offer half of what Terapad is offering now. Terapad is a unique offer, and it’s free so what you got to loose.

Note: Video Preview will be added, as my stupid connection didn’t let me upload that huge file yet.

Useful Resources:
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