Web hosting is crucial if you want to create a legitimate presence online with your blogs.
Why do you need a hosting account for your blog? You can host your blog for free, right? Sure, there are free-hosted blog hosting services, such as WordPress.com and Blogger.com, and they are really, really good. However, if you want to consider your blogs as something beyond blogging – as web properties or investments – You need to self-host your blogs.
Why you should go for self-hosted blog, instead of free-hosted blog
There are two crucial issues that free-hosted blogs lack: value and brandability. For instance, myhotblog.blogspot.com is not brandable and valuable enough compared to myhotblog.com. Sure, you can purchase myhotblog.com and point the domain name to WordPress.com or Blogger.com, but the idea behind a self-hosted blog is the ability to max-out blog customisation.
The importance of web hosting in self-hosted blogs
Obviously, you want a reliable web hosting to host your blogs in – Near-100% uptime track record and fast, powerful, server are the essentials, along with services and support provided.
Your choice in web hosting company to partner with determines the complexity of your blog’s management. Here are some tips to consider when choosing a web hosting company for your blogs:
- Open a reseller account to host your blogs
Why? It’s super easy for your blog to be flipped for profit later on. What’s more, you can offer the web hosting space to go along with your blog sales – This adds value to the purchase price, and highly probably makes a good sales proposition since not many bloggers like to change web hosting account (unless they are already have one or yours suck big time…) Of course, you can sell excess web hosting spaces, too. - Choose web hosting that support CMS well
Many Blogs are built upon CMS (content management system) for easy content management. You have to ensure that your blogs are hosted on Linux server (most CMS are coded on PHP.) Try to avoid Windows server as they are having trouble with URL rewriting to give your blog post “nice” name for search engines and human visitors benefit – So you’ll stuck with myhotblog.com/p=123, instead of myhotblog.com/nice-blog-post-name-wohoo. - Choose the one that runs on Cpanel
Cpanel is not necessarily the best, but it surely the most common – Many webmasters and site owners are familiar with the look-and-feel and the features of cPanel hosting. - Choose web hosting company that offers Fantastico
Fantastico is, well, fantastic – You can install popular scripts, including CMS scripts, such as WordPress and Joomla! in 1 or 2 minutes flat with ease. - Choose web hosting company that offers top-notch customer support
You would want your web hosting provider to support you well, preferably in real time using online chat, such as Host Gator. To know which web hosting companies excel in this, just make sure you read reviews on the Net. - Open a web hosting account with a web hosting provider that offer monthly payment options
Web hosting services paid monthly allows you to bail out easily when things went bad, unlike the yearly-paid counterparts that lose you money when you bail-out. The main draw back of web hosting paid monthly: You are more likely to miss payment, costing you late-fees and account suspension.
