While there are plenty of sites offering free blogs, from Blogger.com to minor WordPress MultiUser powered providers, you cannot consider yourself a serious blogger unless you own your blog’s domain name and host it on your own host. It gives you much more control over what you can do with your blog and how you can make it look. It helps you get rid of the ads those free blog hosts are often likely to force upon your blog. It gives your blog personality, after all.

So you decided to get a web host for your blog - how should you go about choosing one? Among other things, it depends on the blog platform of your preference. As an example, let’s take WordPress. It’s my favourite platform and it’ sone of the most popular blog platforms today. According to WordPress.org (WordPress’s official site), in 2007 alone there were 3,816,965 downloads of the software! And the search for “powered by wordpress” (a line most WordPress blogs have) in Google gives you over 30 million results. WordPress is easy to install, easy to use and can suit the needs of both beginners and experienced bloggers, regardless of their programming skills.

Hosts suitable for installing a WordPress blog should have PHP and MySQL as this is what WordPress uses. A vast majority of Unix-based hosts will have them available. All you have to do is upload WordPress to your host through FTP and follow the installation instructions which are pretty simple. Before installing you will have to create a database - a process that depends on your host but on most hosts, it is pretty easy to do through the hosting control panel.

It can actually get even easier than that. If you get a host that has cPanel as a control panel, often it comes with Fantastico - a script autoinstaller for cPanel. With Fantastico, installing WordPress is literally a single click operation - but again, you will most likely have to create a database before you install it. Which is very easy with cPanel.

To give you just a few examples of such hosts with Fantastico, let me name  ANHosting (shared hosting), FastServers (dedicated servers hosting) and HostGator (a range of services from shared low-budget hosting through reseller hosting to dedicated servers).

If you have had any experience hosting blogs with any other hosts and would like to share it, feel free to drop me a line.