Choose A Web Host For Your Blog – Part I
Choosing the right web host can often be the difference between huge success and miserable failure in the blogging world. I don’t know about you, but I have been personally a victim of bad hosts with even worse hosting services. You work hard to create a blog and make a community around it, and it can all go away if your hosts goes down for a week or two. Besides, people are not going to be necessarily in love with you if your blog is down throughout each and every day on a consistent basis. At the end of the day, you should choose a web host that is right for your blog.
I would like to think of purchasing web hosting services as a long-term investment. You can try to be cheap and get a free web host, but do not expect your host to be there for you when you need them the most. At the end of the day, it all comes down to what you are planning to achieve with your blog. If your ultimate goal is to have multi-million dollar blog, then all roads lead to owning private servers for your business. But you should not start with private servers right out of the bat. But you should plan ahead to make sure your web host can handle the amount of traffic and hits that you will be bringing in. Believe me, you do not want a web host that is great in marketing but pathetic in customer service.
So what do you need to know about a web host before deciding whether it is good enough for your business? You should know how much traffic they can handle in the first place. You want to start with hosts that have 99.9% or better up-time reliability. Many companies claim to have that kind of reliability but you should definitely check authority sites such as Consumer Reports to find out more about your web host. In addition, you should check blogs and forums to find customer complaints and verify the host’s reputation.
You should also find about the features that the host is offering. Disk space and bandwidth are two factors that you should find out about before signing up for a web hosting service. You should also go for dedicated IP addresses if you have multiple blogs. Having the ability to host multiple external domains without any extra fees is a big plus here.
Your host of choosing should come with enough e-mail capabilities to help you manage your blog/business more effectively. Most web-hosts limit the number of e-mails you can have on your account. But as long as you have enough of them, you should not be too worried about it. But you want to sign up for a host that offers you POP3, IMAP, and HTTP e-mail access. I can’t remember the last time I read an e-mail without outlook, and that wouldn’t be possible without above e-mail protocols.
Your web host should support the latest programming scripts such as PHP 5, Ruby, and ASP.net (if you choose a Windows hosting account). Support for Flex and Cold Fusion would be necessary if you are building a Flash-based site, but Wordpress and Blogger are not flash-based, so you will be fine without them.You want to make sure your host comes with database capabilities to support your dynamic blog. MySQL support is a must here.
Most web hosts understand that there is more to business that putting up a site. That’s why they are offering marketing packages to their customers. You should always try to take advantage of coupons and vouchers that are made available with your hosting plan. A few web hosts offer $50 vouchers for Google Adwords and YSM with their hosting services. Make sure you explore these offers before signing up for a hosting service.
At the end of the day, your hosting service can determine the success or failure of your blog. If you are stuck with a bad web host, your site could be down for hours each day (without you knowing it). Try to go for a web host that has a great reputation in the industry and not just a great marketing campaign. And remember, in most cases you get what you pay for.
In the part II of this series, I will specifically discuss the hosts that I have worked with and how you can find the right host for your blog. Stay tuned.
