Whether you are a professional blogger or have just started with your own blog, you have probably had to deal with hosting issues in the past. Web Hosting is one of those tricky issues that can determine the success or failure of your site. You can work on your content all day, but if your website is down when your visitors pay you a visit, you are not going to get too much value out of your web host. Unfortunately, choosing the right web host is not an easy process. There are plenty of companies that promise you a lot of things but don’t deliver on their promise. In the past, I have talked about how you should go about choosing a web host for your blog, so there is no reason to address that again. But even if you do your best to research all the web hosting services around, there is still a chance you can sign up with the wrong partner.

When you start your blog, there is a good chance you are not going to get a lot of traffic right from the start. So the idea of signing up for a shared web hosting service can be intriguing. After all, nobody minds paying $5 a month for one of these services. But many bloggers feel hesitant when it comes to signing up for a VPS or dedicated server account. Those accounts are going to cost you significantly more money. Of course, there is a reason for that.

Shared web hosting services will work fine for new blogs. As long as you are not getting a decent amount of traffic, your shared web host should be handle your traffic. But there are many limitations on these accounts. It’s so easy to hit those limits with bad plugins or scripts on your server. What happens when you hit those limits? Your site could crash or become so slow. That’s the easiest way you can lose your loyal visitors as no one likes to wait a minute for your site to load up, no matter how good your content is.

Shop Like a Pro

The key to finding a good web host is knowing what you need and doing your best to find out what company can offer you what you need. Shared web hosting is not going to work for your blog forever. So if you have big plans for your blog, you want to take the time to search for a web host that allows you an upgrade path. So when you are searching for a web host, not only you want to find out about its shared hosting service but also about its private and dedicated servers as well. You can always switch from one host to another if you prefer it that way, but I’d rather know all about my web host before signing up.

You do want to beware of affiliate marketers when going through reviews for web hosts. Web hosts pay $50-$300 to their affiliates, so the paycheck can be significant for top affiliates. While there are honest affiliates out there, I have seen too many affiliates who promote only services that pay the most money per sign up. There is really nothing malicious  about that approach. After all, how different these web hosts can be, right?

You should always take the time to search for hosting complaints and scams to make sure you don’t sign up for a mediocre post. If you can find people who have first hand experience with hosting candidates, that’s even better. That can be accomplished by searching through top hosting forums on the Internet. Finally, when it comes to hosting, more expensive hosting doesn’t mean better service. So don’t just assume things.

I can’t emphasize this enough. As someone who’s been a victim of bad hosting in the past, I can tell you that don’t want to take any chances with your website. If your site is slow or down all the time, that could lead to a drop in your search engine rankings. Your audience is not going to tolerate your slow site either. When looking for a web host, don’t be cheap. Be smart!

A few days ago, I talked about the pains and challenges of finding a good web host for a blog. I have personally been through a whole lot of web hosts before settling down with Dream Host. In reality, no web host is perfect. All web hosting providers are going to suffer from outages, and every single company out there is going to have something that you won’t like. So, if you are too picky about your hosting service, you may want to get your own server.

I was guilty of being too picky when I got my first web hosting account. I remember I signed up for IX Web Hosting. At the time, IX Web Hosting was considered the best shared hosting service provider by most reputable sites. The hosting plans were rich and a whole lot of free bonuses were offered with each hosting plan. But I made the mistake of signing up for a Windows account than a Linux one. As great as Wordpress is, it is not going to perform to its maximum on a Windows-based server. That’s just a fact. There are web hosts out there that offer compelling Windows hosting for Wordpress. But, why would you want to use a MS hosting account for an open source CMS such as Wordpress. My relationship with IX Web Hosting didn’t last more than a year as I was frustrated with all the issues that I had with Wordpress on Windows. So if you are looking for a web host for your blog, make sure you understand the technologies that work the best with your blogging platform.

I then had a chance to work with 1&1 hosting. At first things were smooth, but 1&1 starting charging me twice for my domains, and Wordpress started malfunctioning on their servers. When I asked their customer service about my issue, they told me that my theme folders were on one server and the rest of my Wordpress blog was on another. I found that to be a strange explanation and a sign that things were not going to work out with 1&1. After a few months of going back and forth with the customer service, I decided to get out of my contract. I learned a couple of lessons from working with these guys:

• Never work with a company that makes it hard to cancel your service: if your web host makes it easy for people to sign up for an account, it should make it easy for them to cancel their accounts as well. If your host is trying to keep you on board by making the cancellation process impossible, then it just does not get the concept of customer service.
• Never work with a hosting provider that does not answer your questions properly on a timely fashion: when I signed up for 1&1 hosting plans, I was rushing into it due to a limited time promotion that they were running at the time. Had I contacted the customer service before signing up for 1&1’s hosting plan, I probably would have figured out if the decision to work with the company was the right decision for my business.

After 1&1, I spend a couple of months with a free hosting service. The hosting was actually great, but I wanted more support, and that’s how I got hooked up with Dream Host. Now, Dream Host’s shared hosting is not perfect, and there are minor issues that happen time to time. But, the service has been reliable, and it has met my criteria for a good web host:

• Great features
• Great price
• Great support
• Great documentation

Dream Host has the best support in the world. There is no doubt in my mind that is the case. I have never gone more than a couple of hours before getting an answer to my e-mails. They also let you call them, which is a plus. But what I like about the folks at Dream Host is the fact that they are straight with their customers. For instance, I wanted to run a social networking script on my hosting account, but the script was too slow. The folks at Dream Host told me that my hosting plan was not the right one for that script, and they offered to help me move to a better plan (they told me how much it would cost and why I should do it to get the best result). I call that great service.

At the end of the day, you need to do your due diligence before signing a contract with a web host. Dream Host has been very good to me, but I am sure there are a few other good hosts out there that offer great service to their customers. There is more to a good web host than a great name, and that’s the lesson I learned the hard way.

In the third part of this series, I will discuss things that you need to look for in a web hosting service before signing a contract with a hosting company. Stay tuned.

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.