Maximizing Your Hosted Blog: What To Look For In A Host

I’ve already mentioned that if you truly want traffic, hosting your blog is the way to go.  This means signing up for web hosting, and placing your blog there.  No, it’s not free — I think it costs me something like $9 a month.  But for that $9 a month, I can have up to 100 blogs!  And believe me, with David’s and my “great blogging experiment”, I think we’ve set up about 10 between the two of us in the last 2 weeks.   (More on the experiment can be found below today’s guest blogger’s article.)

Today, I’d like to introduce Matt Hedges, who is talking about maximizing your hosted blog.  It’s really easier than you think, and he brings up some good ideas.  Matt’s article is a nice summary of information.

Maximizing Your Hosted Blog

A blog is an easy way to publish web content. Although originally for posting online “diary” journals, blogging has helped companies make money.  In some cases, lots of it!

If interested in traffic, you need to host your blog with a web hosting company.  And that blog needs to be maintained.  Where you decide to host may be the difference between a great experience and one that’s frustrating.

It is pretty easy to get a cheap hosting site for your blog. Many people generally ask whether it is alright to go for a cheap host but get good results. The low cost may be of interest to some but quality of serive is actually the most important.  After all, cheap web hosting doesn not do you any good if your blog is down as often as it’s up!

Low Cost Versus More Expensive Web Hosting

It becomes extremely important for you to know of affordable web hosting services, who also offer excellent service.  And aside from uptime (the most important feature of a good web host) is ease of setting up your blog.  And this is especially important if you have little technical saavy when it comes to web hosting!

You should know what tools you need, when considering web hosts. There are a large range of prices available and the rising popularity of the internet means this is likely to rise further.  In general, though, you should be able to find a reliable web host with a variety of services for under $10 a month.

There are certain features which play a crucial role in making your blog a big success. One of the biggest is the database that drives a blog’s engine (so to speak). The database will be created in your Control Panel area called “MySQL”. If you select a major web host, then MySQL 4 is the minimum version to consider.

If you plan to host multiple blogs, you need to know how many MySQL databases you can run.  Most hosts will give you at least 5 databases, which translates to 5 blogs.  Fine if you want just one or maybe a few more.  Terrible if you plan to host lots of blogs.

You need to ensure people can get onto your site when they choose. If your server is slow, this is a terrible situation.  Web users have a low level of patience and if they are unable to get to your site quickly, they will go elsewhere. This will reduce the number of visitors you receive.

Another consideration is how much web space you receive to host your files, as well as the bandwidth you can use.  Web space (basically hard drive space) is critical if you plan to use a lot of photos, plan some podcasts or even video.  Audio and video can eat up space — fast!

Bandwidth can be though of in terms of a water well.  If you have small pipes running from the well to your house, it will take a lot longer to fill that bathtub compared to if you had larger pipes!  So a small bandwidth ultimately means slower service if you have a large blog, or one with lots of pictures, audio files and/or videos files.

Good, inexpensive hosting can be had.  But you need to know what to look for:  uptime reliability, number of MySQL connections, Automated blog setup, adequate web space and bandwidth.  Regular backups are also important; being able to schedule them yourself or even perform them yourself when you want through a control panel is a plus.

Author Matt Hedges:  Republished with permission from WebHostingMadness.com, a provider of hosting company ratings, comparisons and detailed articles about the web hosting industry.

Thanks Matt, for that good information.  Finding a reliable web host that makes it easy for you to maintain your blog for a reasonable fee is important.  If you’re curious to know, David and I use Bluehost for our blogs; the  cost is reasonable and installing a Wordpress blog from scratch takes maybe 20 second (it’s automated for you).  I’ve used a lot of hosts in my day, and I’ve found Bluehost to be great for blogging.

And speaking of blogging, here’s more on our experiment.

Update on the Blogging Experiment

I had something exciting happen the other day.  I’ve been a little preoccupied with tropical storm Fay lately (we live in Florida) or I would have posted this then.

I’ve had a blog up for 2 weeks as of today, and already it’s brought in more money than any of my websites has brought in within the first 4 or 5 months of their lives!  I’m both excited and thrilled to be earning the dollars quickly.

The other blogs (with the exception of one that I didn’t investigate enough beforehand; live and learn) have been getting a steady flow of traffic and plenty of clicks for our affiliate sales.

OK, the cat is our of the bag for our success so far; we use the WordPress Goldmine method for building these little blogs.  I cannot recommend it highly enough!

By Labor Day, I’ll be releasing the names of the oldest of these blogs, so you can see what they’re like, and what we’ve done.

As always, stay tuned for more information!

tag: bluehost