Blog Hosting for Dummies

This following post is contributed by Rajaram Sethuraman who is a software Engineer writing about anything and everything under the Mediterranean sun, visit his blog @srajaram.

If you are reading this, there is a good probability that you already have a blog up and running. There is a high probability that it is either on blogger.com or wordpress.com.

If you are really interested in blogging and not started a blog just because the guy in the next cubicle did, it is time you thought about moving out of blogger and word press to your own domain and hosting it with any hosting provider. Following are excerpts from a fictional book "Blog Hosting for Dummies" which was written fictionally by me sometime in the past.



There are many advantages of moving to your domain.

• You have an identity of your own on the internet. http://www.srajaram.com/ definitely sounds better than srajaram.blogger.com
  
  
• You can have your own email ids on your domain. I don't use this option, though :-)
  
  
• Search engines rank (SEOs say so) content on domains higher than that on free hosts. So, your writing might receive a bigger audience.
  
  
• If you intend to make money through your blog, having your domain is a better option as blogs on own domains are preferred over blogs on free hosts by many ad networks.
  
  
• Buying a domain costs just under 10 USD a year and this small investment or rather the lack of could prove very costly in the future in case you end up becoming really famous!
  

Of course, moving to your own domain has its share of worries

• Where do you host it ? There are hundreds of companies offering hosting and which one do i choose?
  
  
• Hosting a site costs $$$. Currently, i host it on blogger and it doesn't cost me a cent.
  
  
• Blogger/Wordpress never goes down. What if my host goes down and my site if offline for a long time?'
  
  
• I don't know HTML !! How do i "write" pages then ?
  

I hope that this post would cover most of your apprehensions about hosting your blog on a platform other than blogger or wordpress. The easiest way is to buy a domain name and redirect it to your blogger blog.

I buy my domains at GoDaddy. Their interface is clean and clear. They also offer a free hosting package where you can host up to 5 pages. Of course, the godaddy ads appear on these pages. One thing about buying hosting plans with free domain names. Avoid buying the domain name through the hosting company. You never know whether the domain is really yours or registered under the hosting company's name. Domains are cheap, buy them yourselves.

I am assuming that you are planning to "buy" your hosting package. Firstly, these are things you need not worry about when looking for a hosting package i.e not look at what the company says on its pages

• Support providing by the company. Almost all companies say that they provide 24/7 support. Don't trust them. Search around on google for " support" and you might find comments by people who have had first-hand experience with the support from the company.
  
  
• Uptime reliability. I have never seen a hosting company give a figure less than 99.5% uptime. Do a similar search on google to find out the reality.
  
  
• Type of hosting. 99% of the blogs go for Shared Hosting which is the default. If your blog is really popular or you expect it to have hits in the range of a few million a month, then you should go for a dedicated server i.e. dedicated hosting. Dedicated hosting costs bigtime $$$.
  

Things you should be concerned about

• Space provided. Actually this is not much of a concern as most hosting plans give at least a GB of space which is too much in my opinion for an ordinary blog. Of course, if your blog primarily contains photos or videos, then you might run out of space fast. What i do to avoid this situation is that i upload all my photos to Google Picasa Web and then link to it. I don't know whether this is perfectly legal, as i know that it is not with flickr. If you have videos too, why not put them on youtube or the numerous other clones and just link to them?
  
  
• Bandwidth. If your blog becomes super-popular, then you need to worry about it. If any site says "unlimited bandwidth", then be assured that they are lying. Any bandwidth in the range of 100 GB a month is more than enough. I never thought that i would reach this limit, but it happened with this post on Aishwarya Rai's wedding pictures. Also check with the company about their exact policy on this. My hosting company told me that, for my plan, the bandwidth shouldn't exceed 1MB a minute.
  
  
• Number of domains, sub-domains, number of email boxes. These aren't really a concern for the novice blogger. But bigger the better. I am yet to create a sub-domain on my domain, but i know that i get x sub-domains free.
  
  
• Databases. If you are planning to install wordpress as your blogging platform on your domain, then this should concern you. Make sure that the hosting company doesn't charge you extra for mysql databases. Most packages offer them free. I haven't used any database until now for my website. Of course, if you are geeky, go ahead and try!
  

If you don't want to get into the hassle of writing HTML or installing wordpress, just create your blog in blogger and post the pages onto your domain, which is what i do. I hope that this small article helps you a bit in establishing your blog on your own domain.


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