I was trying out the new site hosting service called Terapad.com and I was completely bowled over. Now this is a great out of box experience for people who want to have an online shop and a blog at the same time!

Within a minute, I’d selected a template (six to choose from) and opened my blog/shop at timyang.terapad.com. It has a simple tabbed control panel that I found easy to navigate through. The shop particularly interested me. It has a payment gateway through Paypal and was quite easy to set up.

Other features of interest on Terapad are: visitor tracking stats, forum, calendar of events, image gallery (for your shop and blog items) and it has static pages for your About Page and Location Page etc. It even allows multiple bloggers! Customisability is a breeze since it allows you to re-do your entire site using CSS.

Terapad is 100% free, with paid ads on your site. Don’t worry, they’re contextual ads so they will match your site’s content. But if you don’t want the ads, Terapad lets you remove them with a low fee of just $5 per month.