TypePad by Six Apart is a beautifully thorough proprietary blog software program with hosting included or you can pay for more storage and bandwidth.

Our “TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award” winner is inexpensive – it costs fewer than $5 per month for a basic membership. TypePad’s advanced tools and features include stats, word banning, text file uploads, static pages.

Typepad is an ideal tool for bloggers looking for an audience; this program submits your blog entries to Google, Technorati, FeedBurner and more. They also support private and password protected blogs if you’re writing a personal journal and would like some privacy. Unlike many free blogs, TypePad does not put ads on your site unless you request them.

One of the only faults, the only missing feature we can say about TypePad is that the program uses trackbacks (as opposed to pingbacks, which are less prone to spam. Otherwise, just about every check mark on the matrix is covered by this great program.

We signed up for the advertised the free 14-day trial to test the Basic level package and couldn’t get past the sign-up without having to enter credit card information, which is a bit of a sly tactic. All the other programs we reviewed let you have a trial blog without giving up your credit card information.

Standout features:

• Mobile blogging capable - email, phones and PDA
• Podcasting
• Customize your design
• Build and online community