Blogging is something quite popular in the current world. People write blogs for either personal interests or business reasons. And considering the important of a reliable hosting to the success of your blog, it's worthwhile to take some time to find out what hosting is the best for it.
Server Type
The most popular and powerful blog software is WordPress, an open source application developed by php and running against MySQL database. So, from technical viewpoint, Linux web hosting solution is the best choice for your blog, and it's relatively cheaper than a Windows one as well.
When choosing your hosting solution, please make sure it supports php and MySQL.
Disk Space
Blog software itself won't use a lot of space (less than 10MB for WordPress). And most of the disk space are used for the post you have written, and the image or video used by your blog. Let's plan for 2 year first, think about how many posts you can write per day, and the average size of them. After it, you can make a calculation to know the disk spaces you will need.
And a good practice in blogging is to upload video to YouTube.com and image to Flickr.com, then put a URL in the blog to display the video and images to your readers. By this way, the required disk space will be decreased significantly.
Considering most of the shared web hosting company will give you huge disk space (more than 1000GB), it's not something you need to worry about.
Monthly Transfer
Monthly transfer (sometimes loosely referred to as "traffic" or "bandwidth") is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site. If you go over the limit, then either you will have to be charged with an extra fee, or your website will not be available. The amount of bandwidth you use is obviously related to the amount of traffic (visitors) that you receive.
There are web hosting companies that offer Unlimited bandwidth. This sounds like a good deal. But bandwidth is a commodity that costs the web hosting company money - unlimited bandwidth is really impossible. So, some web hosting companies set a limitation to the CPU or memory your site can use per second, once it exceeds this number, your website will be temporarily unavailable. By this method, they can restrict the usage of bandwidth since more bandwidth usually means more CPU resource or memory resource.
Unlimited bandwidth feature is very common in the industry, so you can just enjoy it, but do put an eye on the stable of your site at the same time. If you get too much traffic and the site become unavailable, you should start thinking about upgrade your plan to an even powerful one (VPS or dedicated server). And a shared web hosting solution should work very well when you have less than 1000 unique IP/day (this is not a small number, your blog has to be within Alexa 100, 000 to reach it).
Reliability and Connection Speed
Reliability and connection speed are something you won't know until you use their service. And this is too late.
So, you should only select the hosting companies which can guarantee its up time. Look for a minimum of 99.9%. Beside this, try to only select the hosting companies having money back guarantee policy, by which your money can be refunded if you are not satisfied with their service.
Support
There are 4 types of web hosting support, and almost all the web hosting companies will provide you with email support system, and online knowledge base. But we highly recommend you to sign up a hosting company with Online Live Chat support, by which you can get the support very quickly and explain your issues clearly. In most case, your issue will be resolved very soon.
Some companies will even provide 24*7 technical support, this is very nice as well.
Price
Price is always a factor, you should realize that you often get what you pay for, although it's not necessarily true that the most expensive hosts are the best. A stable, fast, and 24*7 support server is more important than money.
Most web hosts allow you to select an annual or 2 years payment plan that gives you a cheaper rate than if you were to pay monthly. You might be worried about if you are not satisfied with the plan you purchase, what can you do. You need to check that whether the company provide the money back period so that you can request a refund if necessary.
Once you have made the decision on what hosting plan you plan to purchase, you can further look for some coupon code via Google to get some additional discount.
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