Hosted Blogging: FC2 Blog

As this is my first post I think you should know that this blog is about blogging services and CMS'. So my first review is going to be on FC2 Blog. FC2 Blog is a hosted blog service that is very popular in Japan and somewhat popular in the US. You get 2GB of storage and access to over 5,000 Flash, HTML, and JavaScript themes. You have full access to the HTML and CSS of every theme so if you have coding skills you have full reign of your theme. You can even create your own and post them to the FC2 Themes Directory. I have a few problems with it though:

1. The sub-domain is very complex; *****.blog(server number).fc2.com which makes it hard to find if you don't already know about FC2 Blog. Though FC2 provides fairly good SEO so it isn't as hard to find.
2. The interface has a slight learning curve and there are ads within it (one banner ad at the top of the page).
3. A lot of spam blogs everywhere. This is more so in the US version of the site. There are more real blogs on the Japanese version so there is less room for clutter. These spam blogs are on the from page, in the list of top ranked blogs, and in almost every category of blog there is on the site.

I like FC2 Blog a lot and I still post on it to this day but the problems above may deter you from using it and going to something most popular like Blogger or WordPress.com if you want a free blog.