There is a risk with free blog services like Blogger and Wordpress.com...if someone complains that you are stealing their content, your account can get shut dow

There is a risk with free blog services like Blogger and Wordpress.com...if someone complains that you are stealing their content, your account can get shut down instantly. It is also harder to sell your site later (e.g. on Flippa) because you don't own the domain. There is also a better opportunity to pass pagerank around to your own sites using a real domain. You can get a domain for $8/year and considering the small amount of traffic from even a few hundred sites, you could host them all on a small hosting plan of $10/month. So the cost per site for domain and hosting would be pennies.