Being a newbie or an experienced blogger, choosing the right web hosting solution is vital to the success of your blog. With so many offers out there, it’s easy to get lots and/or make the wrong choice. While there are many companies that offer compelling products, other merchants try to sell overpriced BS – so how do you choose the right web hosting?
First of all you have to determine what you actually need. What’s your blog going to be about? File sharing? Pictures of naked celebrities? Videos? Your niches defines what you need.
For file/video related stuff you would definitely need a lot of disc space, forget 5GB – you would need at least 250GB and a lot of bandwidth.
With frequently uploaded pictures, you might also consider more space, probably not 250GB, but something around 50GB. Although if you’re in it for the long run, be ready to upgrade your accounts fast.
Disc space is one issue, bandwidth is another. While there is a handful of quality unlimited bandwidth hosting solutions, most of them have lots and lots of downtimes. So if you’re just starting, consider purchasing a smaller deal for several months. Pretty much every hosting company wants to seduce you with “hot” deals, like “buy 6 months and get XX% off” – don’t buy that. They just want to enslave you for the long run so you wouldn’t want to change your hosting company when something goes wrong.
Just buy yourself a 3 month mini package with the minimal bandwidth and disc space you feel you could use up during that period, and then make your decision – either stay with that company and upgrade your plan, or seek for other solutions.
Aside from bandwidth and disc space, the absolutely most important thing your hosting company should have is MySQL databases. If your company allows less than 10 of them, or doesn’t allow them at all, screw them immediately. You need to know that you can’t setup a blog without databases, it’s just physically impossible – unless you don’t want to use wordpress and are willing to edit every single thing manually via html – good luck with that.
Other things you might consider while choosing the right hosting is whether or not it has a web-based FTP solution. Some companies have Flash web FTP clients that easily let you upload 100mb+ files without ever having to install any software. This means that you will be able to access/upload/download to your site anywhere and from any device supporting web browsing.
The main aspect, of course, is pricing. If you’re spending more than $4 per month on hosting for 5GB/250GB disc/transfer, you might as well go handing out money to the poor, it (your money) will be put to better use. Remember that spending more than $30 per year on hosting your average blog is a rip-off. Of course, if you use only large companies, then yeah, it’s the standard price, whilst you can easily find family-owned businesses with 100% uptime and get special deals with them. Communication is the key.
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