The Definitive Guide to Blog Hosting

Everyone and their dog is blogging nowadays, and as far as a lot of people are concerned, a blog has also ended up representing an important income source. If your posts are interesting enough in order to get noticed, it’s only a matter of time until your blog starts getting flooded with visitors, and working with a hosting company which isn’t able to keep up would not exactly be a smart choice.

What Makes Blog Hosting Different?

First of all, it’s important to know that blogging platforms such as WordPress are quite demanding when it comes to resources. Some people assume that just because blogs don’t seem to be very complicated applications, they’re a dream come true for any person who is looking to save a buck on hosting.

Unfortunately, that is definitely not true: while most of these platforms can be used free of charge, they do come with disadvantages. In other words, if you receive a sudden burst of traffic from a source such as the Digg frontpage and your host isn’t experienced, your website will go down faster than you can say “oups”, and you’ll end up missing out on a lot of exposure.

It should be clear that going with a host which is extremely experienced with blogging platforms and understand that blogs do have special needs is recommended. Aside from that, there are things you can do yourself in order to make sure that your blogs don’t go down the minute they start receiving a little more exposure than usual, but more on that a little later.

Spending a Fortune Right from Day One?

Obviously, spending three figures per month right from the beginning wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Once your blog becomes more popular and you can monetize it accordingly it will, but until that happens, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on hosting.

Instead, go with a company which understands the basics of blog growth dynamics. There are a lot of popular companies out there which seem to have forgotten about the importance of quality support. Just because they have a large customer base, they end up thinking that catering to the needs of each and every customer is not worth it and, for that reason, will ban your account the minute you start receiving more traffic.

As strange as it may sound, the “Thousands of Customers Can’t Be Wrong” saying is a gimmick and nothing more in most cases. There are a lot of newer companies out there which are willing to be there for you once you start outgrowing a certain hosting plan. Instead of banning you right from the start, they will contact you as soon as they notice that you need more resources and will help you upgrade to a more expensive plan. At one point or another, you will just have to pay more for hosting, but if you had to choose between a company which just removes your account as soon as your blog becomes more popular and a company which helps you find a solution, what would it be?

Your Host Is Not Always at Fault

Obviously, choosing the best web hosting company for your needs is extremely important, but there are things you can do as well in order to make sure that your blog doesn’t go down the minute you start receiving more traffic.

Let’s take the so-called “Digg Effect” as an example: once one of your blog posts hits the frontpage, you will literally receive tens of thousands of hits just like that. And since platforms such as WordPress are quite demanding when it comes to hardware resources, it should come as no surprise that the server will easily crash.

Fortunately, there are all sorts of scripts and plugins created for such special occasions. When it comes to WordPress, installing the “WP-Cache” plugins will prove to be of great help and, whatever the platform you are currently using may be, there are solutions which can make it handle sudden bursts of traffic such as the “Digg Effect” better. No, your hosting provider is not always at fault: you have responsibilities as well.

The Best Hosting Company – Is There Such a Thing?

The answer is actually quite simple: no! The best hosting company is the company you work best with and that’s pretty much it. If both parties do their job right, the partnership will work.

As you can see, “The Definitive Guide to Blog Hosting” has an obvious conclusion: start small, pick a company which is able to cater to your needs once your blog becomes more popular, do whatever you can in order to implement changes which turn your blogging platform into something less demanding in terms of resources and you will be just fine.

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