If you are looking at joining the bandwagon of over 80 million blogs on the Internet, it’s not too late. But if you are contemplating on either hosting your own domain and blog or choosing the free hosted platform, we recommend that you setup your own domain and install the blogging software of your choice.
The purpose of this post is to help you find the host that meets your requirements and also to tell you about the features you should be looking for in the hosting company.
Domain name: We strongly recommend that you stay away from the free domain offers from hosting companies and register a domain name on your own. In future, if you decide to discontinue hosting with a provider, you will not have to worry about transferring your domain name from them to your new hosting company. This will save a lot of your valuable time.
Hosting software: Our choice of software is WordPress that meets the demand of a vast majority of the bloggers. Anyway, most of the open source softwares are built to run on PHP and MySQL combination and should you choose any of those, you should then be looking for a hosting company that supports PHP and MySQL based hosting. The web server is of course Apache and almost every hosting company has servers running it, so no problem with that. Also, look for the availability of mod_rewrite module in Apache for your blog to be able to rewrite fancy/custom URLs for you. That will help you in search engine optimization of your blog.
Website Space: For starters, disk space worth 100MB is just more than enough. For serious bloggers who will write a lot many posts, we recommend that you get at least 500MB on a safer side. The bigger the better but don’t get too much because you may not use all of that anyway.
Bandwidth: One popular post and your bandwidth meter will not stop until your allocated bandwidth is exhausted. If you write great content and your post gets dugg on Digg, expect a lot of traffic. So, get yourself some descent amount of bandwidth, say at least 10GB a month. Keep an eye on your bandwidth consumption and buy more when needed.
Multiple domain hosting: If you intend to launch more than one blog, check for multiple domain name hosting account with the web hosting company. Otherwise, you will end up buying two hosting accounts. Better, choose a reseller account that will let you host multiple domain names on a single account and save a lot of money.
We hope that this post will help people who are starting afresh with blogs. If you have any suggestions or comments, please post them in the comments section below.