Web Hosting is a service that supplies the necessary technologies and resources that are required for the blog.
It is like renting out space for your blog files, media, and folders on servers located in the different parts of the world!
Once you have built your website or blog, now its time to find a proper web hosting.
Web hosting makes it possible for visitors to view your website on the internet.
Having a good looking and perfect website enhances the user experience and therefore increases your online business.
Reliable and high-performing web hosting is a crucial part of any successful website.
People think the domain name is sufficient to make the website active but it is not ..!!
But having a reliable web hosting thus fulfill the purpose of having your own blog or a website.
WHAT IS BLOGGING?
A Blog is a kind of information or discussion website that is updated frequently by the blog owner on a specific topic or niche.
Typically, the blog may be handled by a person or a small group of people together shares the work involved.
In the blog, the published articles are arranged in reverse chronological order so that the recent blog post appears first.
People use to start a blogging business to generate a second income for their career.
Blogging is the most trending business opted by many people across the world.
Web hosting is the most important running factor for successful blogging.
In this article, we are going to discuss the 10 things to consider before buying a web hosting plan for your blog.
TYPES OF WEB HOSTING:
Before getting into the actual subject, let me explain to you the types of web hosting (it’s necessary here).
Many bloggers usually get confused about choosing the best web hosting plan for their first blog.
Even when they do a Google search, lots of resources are available, but most of them confuse the bloggers.
Let me tell you, that, the web hosting are classified into three major types:
- Shared Web Hosting (Best for new bloggers under budget)
- Virtual Private Server Hosting (Suitable for a blog that gets a decent daily visitors – says 10000 visitors per day)
- Dedicated Hosting (Perfect for full-time blogging with at least a half-a-million daily visitors)
You may come to know about Managed WordPress Hosting and Cloud Hosting.
This type of hosting is being commonly used by bloggers in the recent decade, but function wise every hosting is similar.
I will explain this in another article and we will move to the topic of this article.
Let us discuss the necessary things to decide when choosing the right web hosting plan for your blogging business.
THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN CHOOSING WEB HOSTING:
-
Price:
The price is the first important thing to consider when you are about to buy a web hosting plan for your blogging business.
As I said earlier, a properly built shared hosting environment is enough to accommodate your blog at your beginning.
Shared web hosting is affordable as well as it will help you save a lot of money invested unnecessarily in the hosting server.
Most new bloggers are not interested in investing huge money in hosting because they may or may not have that budget.
Hence, Shared Web Hosting plans are the most suitable and convenient for newbie bloggers.
Many hosting providers give an affordable shared hosting plan for small businesses and new blogs starting at $1.5 per month.
But you should not only focus on the price but also consider other important things like hosting service quality, data center, etc.
-
Data Center Location:
Another important aspect to consider is the data center location. Usually, hosting companies have installed their data centers in multiple locations.
The location of your hosting server data center is another important factor to consider when buying web hosting.
If your target audience is from India, you should consider purchasing the hosting from an Indian company.
But if you buy the hosting from the US hosting services, your blog will take more time to load in your target location (India).
Buying hosting from other countries where your target audience is not located is never advised by any expert.
Your blog will load faster to your audience if your server is closely located to your target location.
Speed is the important ranking factor and hence server location is considered as an important thing.
-
Hardware Resources:
Mostly all hosting centers have built their servers using quality hardware equipment for uninterrupted service.
But you should also consider asking about the hardware components of your hosting server to gain some more exposure.
Using low-end hardware components can harm your blog and sometimes may put your blog offline often causing trouble in your growth.
You will lose your ranking and therefore your revenue will get affected. So ask for the hardware resources promptly.
Good quality hardware provides the maximum performance output for the smooth operation of your site.
Some hosting companies may use used hardware to build their servers and you should be cautious when purchasing one.
Buy hosting plans only from the reputed companies having a good track record and years of business.
-
Features and Limitations:
Not all businesses are similar and hence it’s necessary to know the features and limitations in your hosting plan.
Choose the proper hosting plan based on your current needs and the future requirement in order for the smooth running.
Features such as expandable ram, automated backups, disaster recovery are important things to consider.
Experienced bloggers before selecting a new hosting or migrating to new hosting (for trying), they do consider these features.
Other features may include regular backups, load management, DNS services, and free domain privacy, etc. may be considered.
Don’t feel hesitant to ask for the features of the server and the limitations of the various hosting plans before buying one.
If you find the one that offers something you need, you should look into using that company.
-
SITE UPTIME:
Network Uptime is a very important factor to consider because your site reputation depends on your maximum site availability.
A recent study states that an average e-commerce site loses almost 42% of its revenue because of unstable servers.
You could also face difficulties in ranking your blog in the search engines if your hosting provider has weak servers.
Therefore, make sure that your service provider guarantees you the maximum possible server uptime.
Buy a reliable hosting service from the service provider who offers preferably maximum uptime 99.5% or more.
It is necessary to make sure that your site and the data are accessible any time over the internet from any place.
Also, ask them the previous track record of their server uptime.
-
Email Features:
Email is the main important communicating tool for the blogger in the past decade and also in the current decade.
Email helps you to communicate actively with your blog subscribers and update them when you publish or modify a post in your blog.
Some hosting companies do not offer emails in their hosting plan and you have to buy them separately.
So be cautious and ask them if they provide inbuilt email services with your hosting.
Also, consider the following email features for your blogging business.
The number of Email Accounts, IMAP, SMTP, POP3, webmail access, spam filtering, virus filtering, etc.
-
Technical Support:
Support is one of the main important thing and a big deal when selecting the right hosting company.
If your site, for some unknown reason, goes down, your provider should have a solid support department to assist you at times when needed.
Your hosting provider should have a door to let you speak to a real person 24×7 on whatever matters.
Most providers offer multiple levels of support to maintain their solid reputation such as live chat, email, ticketing system, etc.
You should also consider that, whether you can able to get real human support at times when needed.
In recent days, most of the hosting providers have their in-house support team for their customer satisfaction.
-
Add ons:
Addons are mostly required for new bloggers (for ease of operation) because they don’t have strong technical knowledge.
Ask yourself,
- What makes this hosting company the first choice to choose as your hosting partner?
- Does your hosting enable you to add sub-domains, addon domains, parked domains, etc?
You can look for such addons such as one-click installer (softaculous, Installatron), SSL certificate, etc.
Other addon includes a control panel (cPanel), site lock, code guard to access and protect your site.
You can give priority to those companies, who can offer those add ons without additional cost.
Few companies give you a free control panel which is tougher for you to manage your server.
-
Company Reputation/Customer Review/Satisfaction:
It is necessary to choose a reputable web hosting company that has a good customer review in the near past.
Check out each provider you have planned to buy by visiting their Twitter, Facebook page or do a Google search.
This will give you insight into what their current and former customer feel about the company.
You can also find the information about their customer support and assistance by visiting dedicated hosting review sites (host advice, host search, etc).
Does your hosting company is easy to contact? What’s the average response time for your query?
These are important things to consider when buying a web hosting plan.
-
Room to Grow:
As we all work towards reaching a certain height (growth) in our blogging career, consider that your provider has the facility.
Does your web hosting company has required technologies to allow you to increase your resources when you grow in the future?
For example, your server should have enough resources to handle the high traffic that your blog receives.
It’s important to consider the following points before selecting a web hosting.
The hosting company can able to easily upgrade your account without downtime.
The company can scale its server resources to match your blogging growth etc.
OTHER IMPORTANT FACTORS TO CONSIDER:
The list doesn’t end as there are many other factors to consider.
Let me give you some small brief about the things.
- Control Panel (to manage your hosting server)
- Scalability (able to increase or decrease your server resources)
- Backup (to save your site from disaster)
- Website Builder (easy to build a site without hard coding knowledge)
- Server Reliability (ability to give maximum performance at various load levels)
- Server Security (able to defend from vulnerabilities and attacks)
- Maintenance Costs (cost-effective and should be under budget)
- Running Costs
- Hidden Costs
- Money-Back Guarantee (usually all hosting companies offer 30-day money-back guarantee)
Shopping for a web hosting plan isn’t an easy task like buying chocolate from a store.
It requires special attention and proper planning because your business entirely depends on hosting.
Make sure all the above conditions are properly met before choosing the right hosting company as your hosting partner.
LIST OF QUALITY AND CHEAP WEB HOSTING SERVICES:
So far, I have explained to you the need to consider various factors before buying the right hosting plan.
Now, Let me give you a small review of the cheap and affordable web hosting companies.
Picking the best and cheap website hosting provider is not an easy task, but you can learn from the above article.
Now let’s see some best hosting services for your blogging career.
- Site Ground Hosting (plan starts from $3.95 USD per month, guaranteed uptime, 4.5-star customer review)
- Kinsta (plan starts from $30 USD per month, specializing in managed hosting services)
- Raj Softech Solutions (plan starts from $1.5 USD per month, guaranteed uptime, automated backup solutions)
- GoDaddy (plan starts from $2 USD per month, best and reliable servers, options to choose data center location)
- Hostgator (suitable for bloggers and the plan starts from $2.64 USD per month, custom email solutions)
- Bluehost (plans stars from $2.95 USD per month, suitable for bloggers and one of the preferred hosting partner)
- Inmotion Hosting (plans starts from $6.39 USD per month, unlimited emails, unlimited disk space)
- Milesweb Hosting (plans starts from $1.25 USD per month, unmetered disk space, unmetered bandwidth)
- Hostinger (plans starts from $1.25 USD per month, decent uptime, cheapest plan for beginning bloggers)
- A2Hosting (plans starts from $3.96 USD per month, unlimited storage, bandwidth)
CONCLUSION:
Blogging is a great business for every people who wish to create a second income career.
But successful blogging depends on the perfect web hosting server. A small mistake will put you up in big trouble.
When you search for Google about things to consider when choosing a web hosting plan, you will be bombarded with tons of information.
Ask yourself what is needed for your blogging? so that you can get a clear idea to choose the perfect hosting.
All the best,
Myilraj,
You have uncovered all the factors to choose a perfect web hosting for blogs. Your web hosting checklist is comprehensive. Nothing to added up. Great pitch, of course!