What is the very first thing a new blogger has to do before he starts his blog? Assuming he has already bought domain, of course.
Choosing a theme? Picking between WordPress and MovableType? Writing epic stuffs?
Nope. None of that. Sure, you could do any or all of them first but without having a web hosting service, nothing you do will matter. Why? Because you don’t start buying furnitures or hire an interior decorator before you buy a house.
Now you could pick any hosting service that comes up on your search. You could ask your friends. Or you could just go with the company a blogger you read is recommending (*cough* affiliates *cough*). But does it guarantee that you will be in good hands?
You see, a good hosting service is very important. For every successful blog, there is always a reliable hosting service behind it. Ask Copyblogger, Problogger or any top names in blogging world and they will confirm this. Why? Because your blog simply won’t survive on a bad hosting.
But then picking a hosting service is not easy. We get it. There are several kind of hosting, and there are hundreds of hosting firms out there. It’s like walking in a maze with eyes closed for starters.
Choose Best Web Hosting Service
So, here are rundown of hosting services, and reasons why you should be choosing any of them.
Shared Hosting
This is typically the most affordable option and most popular too. Guess price tag and popularity go hand in hand. Shared hosting will put your website on same server with a lot of other websites. Don’t worry. The servers are powerful enough to handle a few hundred websites on it. Hopefully. If your web hosting company is a good one, of course. Shady ones will use low-grade hardware and try to squeeze out every juice out of it. Stay away from them.
This is where you start if you are just starting out. Sure it won’t be ideal if your blog is getting loads of traffic but for most starting blogs, it will suffice. There are a lot of affordable but good hosting services out there. What you should prioritize here is in good customer support, uptime guarantee and money back guarantee. Not on imaginary “unlimited” bandwidth and storage space. Minimum 500MB storage and around 10GB bandwidthwill be plenty for any kind of starting blogs. You can easily search good ones using hosting services comparison tool on BestHosting.org. You can easily get one in the range of $4 ~ $8 a month range.
Cloud Hosting
Now we hear this term a lot in recent years. But it is not some magical new platform. It is just a new way of structuring infrastructure and using virtualization and other technologies to deliver hosting service that is so much more redundant and has better uptime. Now you see, if you didn’t understand what was just said, chances are, you don’t need cloud hosting yet. Plus, most companies offering “cloud hosting” are actually offering glorified shared hosting anyway. Some of them are legit though, since they use same technologies to build cloud platforms to deliver shared hosting services to you. But the term cloud hosting is so loosely used all over that it can cover from shared hosting type to VPS type.
This is for you if you want more redundancy, better uptime, better load balancing and perhaps access to resources like hosting your blog on one web server, store your blog’s data on separate database servers, and so on. This is higher end level of cloud hosting. If you really want shared hosting level of cloud hosting, you might want to look into MediaTemple and Site5.
Virtual Private Server Hosting
Virtual Private Server (VPS) gives you a lot more control than shared hosting. Basically, virtualization technologies are used to create virtual servers on a powerful physical server hardware, and you get complete access to one (or more, if you are paying) VPS. Complete control, it’s all yours. With such control comes responsibility. You are fully responsible to manage your server, including security updates, deploying whatever server software on it and everything that has to do with managing a server. You could buy managed VPS solutions though, which comes with a sysadmin that will manage your VPS. At a price tag, of course, you can do a lot of things with a VPS. The same things you could do with a dedicated server to yourself, but at much lesser cost.
If your blog is getting a lot of traffic and shared hosting services aren’t cutting it anymore, this is your option. You will have access to powerful system resources (gigabytes of RAM, dedicated processing power and all that), a lot more dedicated bandwidth and storage, and no other websites gnawing at your precious system resources. It is also a lot easier on your wallet too.
Dedicated Servers
The ultimate of hosting solutions. You will get the whole physical server hardware to all yourself. No hundreds of other websites or even a few VPS sharing the resources of one hardware. You get everything to yourself. Just like VPS, it also comes with huge responsibility for you. You can either manage it yourself, hire someone or get managed dedicated server hosting from companies that provide such service. The pricing varies depending on if you are getting managed or unmanaged, and what kind of hardware you are looking for. Entry level servers are pretty affordable and you can even get them under $100. But then, you can get similar kind of system resources on a VPS for around $50 or so. If you are going dedicated, then your need better call for good hardware. And when you use good hardware, you won’t regret your decision. You can either rent the existing setups from hosting companies or with some, you can even customize the hardware to your heart’s content.
Your blog is going to be really big (think Problogger and Copyblogger level) and famous if you are looking into dedicated servers. They can handle a lot of traffic and a lot of loading stress. Comes with a proper price tag too. But if you are not experienced in managing a server, we suggest getting a managed solution since your inexperience might lead to bad security practices which in turn lead to being hacked.
