Server: Dedicated or Virtual?
Finding a Host for a Blog
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.
What to Look for in a Web Host
When choosing a web host to host your web site, you need to realize that there are different options available at different price levels and it all boils down to your actual needs.
Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself when choosing your hosting:
- Do you intend to host one domain or multiple domains?
Some hosting plans are limited to one domain only while others let you host 5, 10 or even unlimited domains. - What country is your site’s target audience?
E.g. if you target the UK you will have better chances ranking in local search results if you host your site on a UK based server - be sure to check with the hosting provider where their servers are located. - What technologies do you intend to use on your site?
If you intend to build a database driven site make sure the host offers an option to create a database. If your site will be built using ASP you need to go with a Windows server. If you need to use secure transactions make sure your host provides a security certificate, and so on. - How large is your site going to be?
How much space does your host give you with your hosting account? - How much traffic will your site get?
This might not be an issue for most personal or small business sites, but you never know. Ever heard of the “Digg effect”? - If your site gets digged, will your bandwidth be enough to handle all that traffic you get? Or will you end up paying enormous extra fees for the bandwidth use over your plan’s quota? - How many email accounts are you allowed to have?
This is especially important for businesses as you wil probably want to have email accounts for all your personnel. - Shared, reseller or dedicated server?
For most small sites and newbie webmasters, a shared hosting account is perfectly enough. However, if you intend to host multiple sites and have more control over your hosting, you might want to opt for a reseller account. Dedicated servers and virtual private servers are good for more experienced webmasters who are familiar with administrating Unix servers and need to host multiple sites with heavy traffic.
Other things to pay attention to are, evidently, a host’s uptime, the control panel interface (CPanel or Plesk? or some custom solution? - what are you most confortable with?), options for file management, what kind of statistics you will get and of course pricing. It might also be a good idea to see if the host has a moneyback guarantee in case you buy it and then find out some features you needed are missing.
Make sure to compare several hosting options with similar features before buying and best of luck with you new hosting!
