Thank you, eponym for making Hmm your Blog of the Day today, Saturday April 22, 2006.

Admittedly, I’d never heard of eponym before seeing them in the referrer logs today. Appears they launched earlier this year. They are a blog software and hosting service that has in excess of 10,000 blogs, offering a free blog with 10MB space and 100MB traffic. More features and bandwidth in pro packages (for $$$) that competes against third party blog services like Typepad. See how they stack up in the feature comparison here. Their platinum (best?) plan is $29.95 for 3GB space and 20GB transfer, although it seems by a recent blog post that they haven’t been enforcing their transfer limits and plan to start doing so effective May 1st.

We have no need currently for a service like this, but for those who don’t want to run existing blog software at their own hosting company [note: can get dedicated servers with hundreds of GB monthly transfer for under $50USD a month], you might want to take a peek. The major advantage I see with services like this is not having to take time and patch the software with new upgrades. Centrally hosted blogs can also provide global spam patrol which can be good or bad. One downside is if the mother ship goes down, where does that leave your blog? This has been an issue a few times with Typepad.

I wish eponym good luck with their business because they are in an extremely competitive market, especially with hosts like 1and1.com offering rock bottom hosting prices and open source blog scripts like Wordpress not that difficult to install and use.

Eponym’s podcasting plan ($39.95/month) for example has bandwidth limits where others like Libsyn and Audioblog don’t. Tough to compete with limits against those without them. And yes, I do realize that there is no such thing as “unlimited bandwidth” even if some companies advertise that’s what they provide.

For those wondering what eponym means: a person for whom something is named. They were wise putting that definition beneath their masthead.

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