Where Should You Host Your Blog?

By Lynette Chandler

Should you host your blog yourself or pay someone to host it? It doesn't matter if you're a newbie or a veteran this question always comes up when creating a new blog. Usually someone new to blogging would gravitate to hosting a blog themselves or get a free blog and as time goes by with experience they begin to ponder maybe paid blog hosting isn't so bad after all. So what is better?

To answer this question, let's first look at how a blog is created. Just like creating web pages, first, you need a software or script that will take your entries, format it and publish it to the web. The second component of a blog, is the web space, where the software should publish to, a home for the blog pages.

Knowing this information, let's review the different ways to host a blog:

Full blog host.

This is where the blogging system or software is provided for you and your blog is also published to a web space provided by the host. Blogger, SquareSpace and Typepad fall into this category. It's very much like creating a website with a site builder.

Hosted blog software but published elsewhere

This is where the blog software is provided for you but the blog pages are published to another website or web host altogether. By doing this, the software acts as a publishing system like FrontPage except it creates nicely formatted blogs. Blogger is probably the most well known for this. Yes Blogger can do both. Publish to their host or to yours. As a comparison, this is like using FrontPage to publish your website.

Blog software and blog are hosted on your web server

This is where you would install the blog script (software) on your web server – it can be any web hosting account. And when you publish, the blog itself resides on your web server also. To draw a parallel, this technique is like buying web hosting and then installing a content management system on it to help you build web pages.

If you're new to building web pages or have built sites using site builders then you might want to go with a fully hosted blog. These hosts do all the nitty gritty for you and there's very little technical stuff you need to know. If you can point and click, you can build a blog with a full blog host.

Having said that, just because you're seasoned at building web pages doesn't mean full blog hosts won't work for you. In fact, if you have many blogs this becomes very appealing since you won't have to worry about upgrading the blog script, people exploiting the script, making plug-ins work or what happens when your web host decides to disable part of your blog functions because there is a security hole. All you do is concentrate on blogging. After a while, blogging becomes more important than maintaining your blog and that's the way it should be.

Next up, hosted software but blog is published to your website. This seems to be the best of both worlds. At time of writing, Blogger is one of the best ways to do this but because of its popularity often, you find the system too slow to publish or completely down just when you have a hot idea to share. The idea is good but you'll also be depending on someone else's availability to publish your blog. It's much like using a friend's computer to build your web pages and you know how that can go.

Finally, you have the option to use scripts. This is also a very popular method. The flexibility it allows is very liberating because you can mould the blog anyway you want. You can even get a programmer to create custom plug-ins or customize the whole blogging system the way you want it. In short, you can do pretty much anything you want.

The down side, you need at the very basic, some knowledge of HTML or publishing web pages. Also the burden of upgrading, troubleshooting and maintaining the script is on you. If you have one or two blogs it's not so bad but once you start having more, it can be quite tedious. You also have to consider all the other responsibilities of maintaining the script as mentioned earlier.

Armed with this information, you should be able to figure out which one is for you. If you're still undecided, think of how you would do it if you're creating a regular website. Chances are your choice method for publishing a website is also the best method for you to create a blog.

About the Author: Lynette Chandler is creator of Blogging Starter Pack, an audio visual ecourse to help entrepreneurs start blogging. Access part of this blogging course for free today.

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Website Hosting Companies. Understanding How Hosting Poviders Work

By John E Adams

Website Hosting - How To Select A Web Host Provider That Wants You To Succeed

As with a lot of purchases, your first urge when choosing website hosting is to go with the cheapest. After all they are all similar, so why should you pay more?

There are a number of objective standards which separates one website hosting company from some others, and money is only one of them. And it should be made clear that the cost should not be the most crucial one.

Choosing a website hosting company based on price alone is equivalent to selecting a builder or electrician on price alone. Certainly, they might maintain or fix your house cheaper, but will your house be safe?

The first consideration is power. Will the website hosting company have the capability to provide and deliver adequate performance? Most web hosting companies advertise that they are able to provide massive bandwidth and hundreds of dedicated servers, and they are usually telling the truth.

However, there is a big difference between existing capacity and usable capacity. Think of it this way; If a website hosting provider has thousands of websites with millions of visitors per day, the usable free capacity would be much lower. Here is a simple example; A delivery truck may have the capacity to carry 8,000 lbs. But not if it is already carrying 7,999lbs!

The experts would advise you ask about available capacity, and have the hosting company back up their proof with reliable numbers. And of course, if you cannot read the data they provide, find somebody to help you do so.

Next, and a very close second, is dependability. A lot of power is worthless if it is cut or goes down often.

Power outages are actually a normal part of business. Even Microsoft, yahoo and google go down on occasions. The difference is, with decent website hosting companies, it seldom happens and a decent provider would have failover plans, which means if their system does go down it is either up once again instantaneously, or you never see the drop because a backup system sets in automatically.

A good rule of thumb is to grill the website hosting company closely about their up time. Most quality hosting providers will say they run at 99.5%, or higher. However, like the infamous on-time estimates of airlines, those figures can sometimes be considered shady by adjusting the definition of up time.

When it comes to website hosting, what should really matter is whether your visitors will be able to reach your site at any time, 24 hours a days should they want to.

Again, the experts would suggest to find out what back up systems, both human and technical the hosting provider has in place to address failures of all sorts. It is a fact that servers can go down, networks do fail, hard disks could become defective and data lose is an absolute fact, and believe me, these conditions can dramatically mean the difference between success and failure for any website owner.

The result is your website becomes unavailable, which is not good for business. As far as a quality website hosting company, the hosting provider must be equipped to deal with any eventuality and have your website up again as quickly as possible.

Last, but not least, is website hosting security.

With the continuing prevalence of computer viruses and the dreaded Spam problems, you need to guarantee the website hosting company you choose has an array of techniques for addressing them. This basically means the hosting provider has excellent technical plans in place and experienced staff available 24 hours a day who are well-educated in addressing with those problems.

There is a very old saying that goes: one ounce of prevention is worth at least one pound of cure, and when it comes to your website, it is vital you understand the meaning.

All these website issues are paramount to locating a website hosting provider that can deliver the best services you need.

Subsequently, once those criteria are fulfilled by a number of prospects, then you are able to begin narrowing down the hosting companies by price.

About the Author: Copyright John Adams. Honest Home Business. Website Hosting Explained - Get As Much Honest Information As You Can Before You Take The Plunge. Honest Advise Is Here

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Free Website Hosting – Is Free Hosting What You Need?

By Don Break

In your search for free hosting for your website, you have probably realized already that there are hundreds, possibly thousands of services on offer. They all want your business, they are all free and superficially it seems they all offer much the same thing.

So how do you choose between them? Does it actually matter which free website hosting company you use, since you are not paying for it anyway? Shouldn't you just go with a free service which has thousands of (presumably) happy customers already, like Geocities, Tripod or Fortunecity?

For the answers to these questions, let's think about what you actually want to do. Whether you are creating an ecommerce site and hope to make some money, or just doing a hobby or special interest site, you want people to actually see your pages on the free hosting site.

This means that you want the free host to serve the pages reliably, with minimum downtime. While no host, paid or free, can guarantee that your site will always be up, you want your pages to be available 99% of the time or more. This is the area where the difference between a free host and a commercial host is most apparent. Check the hosting forums before signing up – any excessive downtime will be receiving comments and complaints. Or see if you can find an uptime guarantee.

Assuming you want people to see your pages, you need a reasonable bandwidth allocation. Free hosts usually set a limit for each customer for each month, and this limit can range from 500MB to 2GB or more. If you are planning to serve large image files, audio or video, the lower limits will be too small, so that will affect your choice of free host.

In addition, storage space on free hosts is often ridiculously limited – some are still offering 10MB, which is too low for almost everyone. Such limits are designed to stop users using the free space for image hosting.

Many free website hosting companies don't give you much control of page layouts, because they only allow hosted pages built with their own internal web-based sitebuilders. Unless you have very simple requirements, this type of free hosting is of limited value.

Then there is the advertising which most free hosts will put around, beside, under or over your hosted pages. Nothing suggests 'cheap and unprofessional' about a web site more than excessive advertising unrelated to the content of the page. Most free web hosts can't determine what a hosted page is about, so they slap on general or branding ads for which they are paid per thousand views. If you care about the impression your pages will give to your visitors, try to look at web pages on a particular free host to check if the advertising is acceptable.

You may believe that none of these issues really matter, since you can just take your site away and have it hosted on another free website hosting service if there are any problems. But there are significant drawbacks to this. If you change hosts, you change your URL, and the search engines will need time (usually several months) to find, spider and index your pages, and your traffic is likely to die in the meantime. You'll need to delete the old pages to avoid duplicate content penalties. Users will have bookmarked your pages on the old host, and won't be able to find the new one. And so on.

It is better to select a good free host in the first place, and stay with them. Or even find a cheap paid hosting service – most people can afford $5 a month, which will now get you very good and reliable hosting, with none of the issues and drawbacks covered above.

About the Author: Don Break writes about hosting, and getting the best hosting value possible. See his web hosting information site.

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Free Hosting Or Paid Hosting the Best Option

By Daniel Millions

Everyone likes something for free. However, free may not always be the best thing to choose. Sometimes, it may even be harmful.If you have thought about paying for web hosting, you will want to take the following points into consideration.

Web hosting companies that offer their services for free will probably not remain in business very long. Why is it that some companies offer free hosing? How is any money being made? There is always a price for everything, even something that is purported to be free. A company may offer free hosting if they are trying to build up their business. Their value may be demonstrated, but they may charge their existing customers additional fees in order to counteract their loss. It is just another form of advertising.

Many companies that do not have the capability for managing servers for websites may make a play with free hosting. However, if the company's load is excessive, your website may be shut down! Another problem with free hosting is resource limitations. Free hosting will only offer you a limited amount of space. It will probably be enough to put up a few dozen pages. However, if you have a very active site, you will find that you quickly run out of space.

A very serious limitation is load. If you decide to go with free hosting, you may find that strict limitations are placed on the amount of bandwidth that you can use. If your site is hot and draws a lot of traffic, the web host may ask you to leave or to be blocked for the rest of the month. A certain amount of bandwidth may be given to you to use each month. Once you have reached that amount, you will not be able to have any other visitors until the beginning of a new month.

With free web hosting you will share equipment with lots of other websites which may very well affect your performance. If you choose to migrate your already established site, it can raise other issues that could have been avoided. Another problem with free web hosting is the lack of support. When you pay for hosting, you can usually get a certain amount of technical support to be able to help you as problems crop up.

If you happen to lose some files due to either accidental deletion or a virus attack, free web hosting companies have no available options to help you out. If the server happens to fail, your website will be up and running when the server comes up. If you have a small site, this may not be a problem for you. It is true that free web hosting companies may be able to protect your website against viruses and attacks. However, you may only receive minimal help if you need services that go beyond that.

One of the most serious limitations may not have anything to do with technical issues. Free web hosting services usually require your website to carry advertising that pays the web host. This may or may not bother you. This all depends upon the individual. If you are planning that your website will grow and be active, then you will soon outgrow the need for free web hosting. In the end, you get what you pay for, so you may actually end up paying for web hosting.

About the Author: If you need high quality VPS Hosting or FFMpeg Hosting with a guaranteed high uptime look no further.

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