Now in this post of the ‘Start Blogging Now!‘ series we move onto the task of choosing your web host! It is important that you find a stable ground for your blog to grow on. Are you going to use the free services that are plentiful in the web and cost you absolutely zilch or are you going to go for a paid hosted blog that will bring you many benefits in the future.

Paid Hosting
These days getting paid hosting for your website is extremely cheap! If you take a look at HostGator their prices are extremely cheap. There are a lot of free blog hosts, but there are also a lot of paid hosts and the company that I went with was HostGator. If you wish to read why then take a look at this post. There are distinct advantages of using a paid web host and this is why if you can afford it, I encourage you to purchase paid hosting. Here are the advantages:

• Better uptime - A paid host can guarantee you uptime on your website which is essential for any serious blogger.
• Support - If you have a problem many companies provide phone, email, live chat, ticket, 24/7 support to solve the issue. This is a feature I love of HostGator, if I have an issue to address their live chat (always online when I need) has been there to help.
• No Adverts - Some free hosts that you go with will force adverts on your blog. You don’t want this especially when they are not your own and your not earning. Not only that you don’t have any control where they go, and what they look like.
• Features - They are plentiful, lots of bandwidth, space and tools that you can play around with all day!

There are not many advantages of paid hosting unless you’re not earning each month, the monthly costs can add up or the one lump sum you pay can be quite large.

Free Hosting
Free hosting can be setting up your own blog on a web host by installing it, creating the MySQL database etc or it can be using a website that sets up the blog for you. It is perfect for when you’re learning and experimenting but setting your blog up on free hosting is something that you’ll need to think about. Don’t get me wrong there are a lot of successful blogs that are hosted on free hosting but there are millions of unsuccessful ones. You will need to size up the advantages and disadvantages of each and the complications that some features would give you in the future. I can only think of one advantage really with free hosting and that is it’s actually free. The disadvantages definitely shine on this one:

• Reliability - You can’t always guarantee your blog will be online. You don’t pay for it so it could go down and can’t demand to ask why because they are giving you the service free.
• Support - They gave you free hosting, you can’t expect them to give you excellent support for free to.
• No control - Your hosting and blog is at the mercy of someone else, you haven’t paid for it so they can do whatever they like. If they don’t like you, bang and your work is gone! This also applies to their rules. If they are offering you something free now, who says they might start charging tomorrow? That’ll cause a problem for you.
• Features - Often on free hosts there are little to no features that you need. You need a high performance package to have the confidence that you won’t just collapse.
• Performance - This moves onto the performance, if you don’t have the features and your visitors start to grow, will your hosting be able to tackle the pressure and keep your site alive?
• The future - Free hosting often offers you a sub-domain this means if your reader count is up, visitors are growing and you decide to move to a paid host because you need the upgrade you won’t be able to take your sub-domain with you and this will make your traffic considerably drop and it’ll be like starting again.
• Sub-domain - It can be long, creates no branding for your website and visitors sometimes don’t like seeing sub-domains which hurts your presence on the web.
• Search Engine Optimization - Many free websites out there offer little information and search engines have learnt this. Hosting your website free can close your website out from the search engines because they think your site is just another site that will give nothing to anyone.

I think that’s enough disadvantages for this post, but I think you get the point.

I’ve used many free hosts and I wrote before about the problems I had of moving to a paid host because the free host was just not cutting it.

Free Hosting Examples

Blogger is a free blog hosting service and can be controlled completely in your web browser. The simplicity in using it makes it very popular for those who can not deal with the technical side of owning a blog. Posting is very easy and your blog can be set up within minutes.

Wordpress.com is a free blog hosting service that is a little bit more technical than Blogger. It offers expansion in your blogging allowing you to install very useful plugins, modify core files, use categories and generally have more control.

Your Choice
You’ll need to make the decision on your own, but I highly recommend getting paid web hosting as you’ll see the benefits in the future. Buying hosting creates a backbone behind your website that you know you can rely on and the company you go with will support you whereas having a free web host creates uncertainty in what can happen. Think of what your going to be using the hosting for, a free host will be ok for a personal blog that you don’t intend on making money from but if your going to blog seriously, then paid hosting is worth the investment.

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