Blogger.com or Blogspot.com -- what's the difference?

Currently working on new logos for my websites. "Blog@jfmanning.com" (top) is for my Blogger site here at https://jfmanning.blogspot.com, and "JFManning.com" pertains to my currently in development main site at https://jfmanning.com (a URL that currently redirects to my Twitter page). Publishing this otherwise pointless post also gave me a shameless excuse to link URLs, insert an image (things I used to code manually using HTML) and share as a Tweet. Still not sure if I miss the manual HTML coding or not...

However, while I'm here, I figured it would be worth mentioning that I looked into the difference between "Blogger.com" and "Blogspot.com"--since I was wondering about that. I noticed a long while back that although this is a Goggle Blogger account, it's hosted on Blogspot.com. Notably, if you enter "blogspot.com" into your web browser's address bar, it will redirect to "blogger.com".

The surprisingly logical answer to this phenomena is that Blogger.com is Google's blogging platform (i.e., essentially the application software and publishing platform); whereas Blogspot.com is the Internet hosting address. If you care about Domain names, this actually makes a lot of sense because what it does is allow a Blogger user to utilize a custom domain name (such as "whatever.com") in place of "whatever.blogspot.com". Blogspot.com is essentially where the blog data lives (Google has to provide an Internet address for it). The name of individual Blogger user accounts (and subsequently the Internet address alias, such as "whatever.com") is completely arbitrary.

It's entirely possible that the preceding technical explanation did absolutely nothing to clear this up for many people. Suffice it to say that in a nutshell, Blogspot.com is the Internet hosting service for "Blogger", and Blogger.com is the Website publishing service.

Now you might be wondering, why didn't Google just use the same domain name (i.e., blogger or blogspot) for both purposes? Technically speaking, they could have. However, this is a question for which I do not have an informed answer. My guess is that for whatever reason, Google specifically wanted to brand the "Blogger" moniker, but in regard to "Blogspot", they viewed it simply as a host address. So what this boils down to is "Blogger" gets all the marketing hype and Web publishing prestige, while "Blogspot" is stuck in Blogger's shadow, doing the actual heavy lifting and behind-the-scenes Internet server work. Funny how that works.

Seriously though, there are probably technical, web server application and DNS service considerations that makes divvying things up between two domain names more feasible from an IT/IS operational perspective.