Web hosting is the second most common blogging challenge according to my survey results. Let’s take a look at what web hosting is and what the best web hosting option would be for various situations.
First — what is web hosting?
Think of your blog or website as your home. You need three components:
- A home address — Just as 354 Main Street might be your home address, your blog needs an address too. That comes in the form www.YourDomainName.com. Every web address or domain name is unique so that when people “look you up”, there is no confusion as to whose home it is.
- A parcel of land — Your home sits on a piece of property that is designated or deeded just for you. It may be in a subdivision or your home might be in a high rise, but you have a document that states which part belongs to you. Same with a website. The web hosting company has parceled out space on its servers just for your website. You might share a server with others or you may have a dedicated server that you don’t share.
- The house — Your website or blog is the structure similar to your house or apartment. Instead of wood and plaster, your website has files and software.
What is the best web hosting?
As with most things, “best” is relative to what you need. And cheap does not necessarily equate to best. Back to our house example–your parcel of land should be big enough to build your dream home but it doesn’t have to be twice as big. Same with your server space. It should have enough file storage and bandwidth to handle your current website and anticipated growth but it doesn’t necessarily need to be able to handle the kind of traffic that Facebook gets.
You also want to look for reliability and flexibility in web hosting. When I say reliability, I mean the server is up and running 99.9% of the time. There is nothing more aggravating than typing a website name in your browser and it can’t connect. Flexible web hosts will offer ample storage, bandwidth, email accounts, SQL databases, etc. to meet your needs and if you outgrow your current server, they can seamlessly upgrade you to bigger digs.
How much does web hosting cost?
This is the good news, because web hosting is very economical especially for new sites. There are several options to choose from (prices are current as of July 5, 2010):
- If you are just starting and want to host 1-5 websites on a single account, you can expect to pay around $5 per month with hosting services like Bonus Blog Web Hosting.
- If you need more space and are planning more websites but you are not planning on selling your websites, expect to pay about $8 per month with a service like Hostgator’s Baby Plan. You can host unlimited numbers of domains on the one account with such a plan.
- If you think you might want to sell a website in the future, upgrading to Hostgator’s Reseller Plan will make the transfer of the sold website very easy because it will be on it’s own space and not connected to your other websites. These plans start at $25 per month and you can also resell space that you are not using.
- Some website solutions come with hosting provided in the overall cost. For example, small business websites from CagoraBiz include a domain name and web hosting along with the website design. Those services start at $197 for a minisite.
Web Hosting Features
As you can tell, I like Hostgator, not only because they are reliable and flexible, but also because they have some features that make life easier for normal people (non-techies). One of those features is called cPanel which provides a icon based dashboard to help manage the various server functions such as setting up email accounts, transferring files and accessing statistics among other things.
If you have web hosting questions, please leave them in the comments below or contact me via email.
