What Serious Bloggers Need To Look For In Web Hosting?

by LeVoltz on 08. May, 2009 in Blog Share

Although it is possible to be a successful blogger using the free blogging platforms, a serious blogger who plans to grow his blogging sphere would generally prefer to use a web hosting that would suit his needs. A Web hosting site would give him the flexibility to use the true power of PHP, Scripts in order to give you more control over your blog.

There are numerous hosting providers and choosing the right one is really important. The hosting provider shouldn’t be chosen solely because it offers the cheapest hosting fee’s, the other factors like the server downtime, features provided, Bandwidth, PHP versions, how many databases are offered, how many web sites can be hosted, etc also needs to be taken into account.

From my post on How To Install Wordpress With Hosted Account

The first hosting plan that I used was a nightmare(I shall not mention the name, though). That plan had costed me dear with not much of features and customer support. Since then I have been using Bluehost, which provides me with good features at affordable rates and real good customer support(the round-about times has been a max of 5 hours). Some of my friends have also been using HostGator, ixwebhosting and Lunarpages and they find that good. I have had some interactions with Justhost and Hostgator on behalf of my friend and they seems pretty responsive.

The customer reviews about Bluehost, ixwebhosting, JustHost and Hostgator are really good. If I was going to switch web hosting providers (which I had done a couple of months back then I would use the following criteria).

I run 2 blog sites so I need the following:

Multiple Domains Hosted
PHP 5
Unix/Linux Web Servers
Console Access (so I can ssh into server and easily manipulate content on site)
Unlimited Storage
Unlimited Bandwitch
Unlimited SQL Databases
24×7 Support

I also want a decent monthly rate, but am more concerned about uptime and performance.

Rank	Web Hosting Provider	Features	Bonus Features
1	Bluehost Editor’s Choice Hosting – Host Rating: 98%	Space: Unlimited Traffic: Unlimited Price: $3.95(Limited period offer)	Free Domain Forever, Host Unlimited Domains, $75 Marketing Bonus
2	JustHost Unlimited Web Hosting – Host Rating: 97%	Space: Unlimited Traffic: Unlimited Price: $4.95	Free Domain Forever, Host Unlimited Domains, $75 Marketing Bonus
3	FatCow Cheap Business Hosting($10 off) – Host Rating: 96%	Space: Unlimited Traffic: Unlimited Price: $4.83	Free Domain Forever, Host Unlimited Domains, $75 Marketing Bonus
4	HostGator Cheap Unix Hosting(20% off Coupon: SPRING) – Host Rating: 96%	Space: Unlimited Traffic: Unlimited Price: $4.95	Host Unlimited Domains, $75 Marketing Bonus
5	ixWebHosting Cheap Shared Hosting – Host Rating: 95%	Space: Unlimited Traffic: Unlimited Price: $4.95	Free Domain Forever, Host Unlimited Domains, Free $775 in Software

P.S. The ranking and rating are given based on several factors like Host reliability, bonus features, key features, up time, customer support, past and current user feedbacks,etc.

Apart from hosting plan, the other thing that you need to choose is the domain name. Getting the domain name in most of the hosting plans is free, if you are not provided with free domain names then I personally like Godaddy, NameCheap and Bluehost for registering Domain Names.

I seriously recommend bloggers and web site owners take a look at the following posts before hosting your blog.