When you get down to the nuts and bolts of how a blog works, your blog is essentially just a website with some software running on it that makes publishing blog entries easy. That means that the software and the files that are your blog posts have to exist on a server out on the internet somewhere.
There are now hundreds of web hosts where you can put your website. While it’s true that many of them are expensive or even scame, the nice thing about all that competition is that it has driven prices of web hosting down to almost nothing!
Free Web Hosting – The Very Real Dangers
I have never, ever seen a free web hosting company that turned out to be a good idea – in point of fact many of them are scams. I don’t recommend using free web hosting – I’ve never seen it work out well. Ever.
The best of the free hosts may actually stay around for a couple of years and you’ll only have to tolerate them putting random ads on the top or side of your site so that they can make advertising revenue off of you. In the worst cases they are actually scams that use malicious software to steal information from your site’s visitors.
In my experience it is just not worth risking the free hosting companies — remember, they’re not altruistic: they have to make their money somehow.
Best Hosting Solution I’ve Found
I heartily recommend a company called Hostmonster. This website you are reading is actually hosted on Hostmonster, as well as many other sites that I run, including a blog that gets over 5,000 visitors a day. I’ve used and worked with a heck of a lot of hosting companies in my time, both for companies I’ve worked for and for my personal use, and Hostmonster beats them hands down, for three main reasons:
- Low Cost
Hostmonster is on the low end of pricing — so low in fact that when I first tested them out a couple years ago I was a bit suspiscious (I’d been burned by hosting companies before). A website with Hostmonster will cost you around $6 – $7 per month. And when you sign up they’ll give you your domain name for free. Hostmonster also gives you unlimited storage space for your site, and unlimited bandwidth — so you aren’t paying extra for getting high traffic (which is common on many hosting providers). - Customer Service
If you have a technical problem or question, they have 24/7 tech support. And best of all they’re based in the US, so you aren’t talking to someone across the world for whom English is a second language. This is also pretty rare to find in a hosting provider. - Simple Scripts
This is a huge deal – really. Hostmonster uses cpanel, which is a fantastic backend admin setup. Most of it you’ll probably never need to use for your blog, but they also have something called Simple Scripts is a life saver. It’s a piece of software that will install various free scripts on your site at literally the click of a button.And that includes Wordpress! So you don’t have to have any special technical skills or know about setting up databases or php settings. You just click on a button and it installs everything for you. Let your host worry about the technical stuff – you worry about blogging.
5 Responses
August 27th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Yeah you’re right about free hosting I had a hostdaddy site and they put ads all over the top of it for online gambling and stuff it looked like garbag.
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:52 pm
Wow, I went to check out hostmonster after reading this, and you’re right! 6 dollars and unliminted everything! As soon as my hosting contract expires, I’m going here!
September 8th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Thank U for recommending this for blog hosting! So easy 2 use! U need to check out my blog only it’s not quite ready yet I have everything up but havent writen anything yet lol!
September 14th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Good choice
November 9th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
I found Hostmonster to be really easy to use, and their tech support people were very friendly and helpful. I give them five stars!
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