I know you can do this with typepad and blogger.com hosted blogs. - Mike Fruchter

$10/year and you have to give it a lot of power - Tyler (Chacha)

You can't send email anywhere else besides Google Apps, and it basically takes control of the entire domain. So it is a all or nothing situation - Tyler (Chacha)

Excellent, thanks Chacha! - Mike Fruchter

I'm trying to do it myself, but I don't want to give up email, so no banana - Tyler (Chacha)

I believe with blogger and typepad it's free. Is WP the only one charging for this feature? - Mike Fruchter

mike, TypePad isn't really free; you've got to pay your monthly thing for TypePad access, although the domain mapping is free within that. Other thing I'd check though with WP.com is the ability to show ads, for memory you couldn't either at the base level. - Duncan Riley

Duncan, I was totally unaware of that as well. I'm doing a little research into web-based hosted blogging platforms, that just saved me some valuable time. Thanks - Mike Fruchter

Last one, does blogger.com offer any type of pay for play type plan? - Mike Fruchter

Blogger is By Google = Free - Tyler (Chacha)

Muchas gracias - Mike Fruchter

You can mask anything to another domain as a CNAME record - use something like ZoneEdit.com to do it. - Jesse Stay

Mike, if you're looking for a decent cheap Wordpress host that's easy to setup you might want to check out bluehost.com which I use to host Lifestream Blog and my personal site. I'm pretty sure you can't install custom plugins on Wordpress.com which is a huge limitation. - Mark Krynsky

@Jesse, thanks. @Mark, thanks for the recommendation as well. My blog is currently self hosted. The reason I ask is for a blog post I'm working on. I appreciate the info guys. Thanks! - Mike Fruchter

My mom just told me to check out bluehost to see if we should switch. Hrm. EDIT: That sounded really lame, didn't it? :) - Rahsheen ™, Coach Rah

Mike, my blog is at Wordpress.com and configured with a subdomain (blog.jemm.net), but I have my personal server at jemm.net, so I can control the "rest" of the domain. Anyway, I can live with the limitations of the Wordpress.com as I don't plan to put ads to my primary blog. I have some commercial blogs (with my wife) at the TypePad, but the folder/domain-structure has to be planned carefully, if you plan to have multiple blogs there. - Jemm

Jemm, thanks for comment. This post is more for research purposes, I do appreciate you weighing in on the topic. That's some good food for thought :) - Mike Fruchter

I'm doing a post on web-hosted blog services. The more I can arm my readers, the better off they are. Thanks! - Mike Fruchter

10-4, and top of the morning to you Mohomed. - Mike Fruchter

GoDaddy's domain management lets you mask it with your domain but the url never changes. So at newsmavens.com when you click around the url in the browser never changes. Makes it hard for users to send direct links. - Brent

Does the PR 9 of wordpress.com rub off on the hosted blogs? - Matt Albiniak

Mike, Did you finish your post yet? I am interested in reading it as I am doing research myself. - Amani

Yes, see http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2006... - Internet Strategist

@Amani, still working on it bud. I have a few more posts ahead of it that will be released this week. I will keep you in the loop though. Thanks. - Mike Fruchter