Blog hosting

Overview
The hosting needs of a business owner, a personal user, a giant corporate industry and a midsize business greatly vary to a good extent. Mostly, the personal users who wish to create their identity over the internet require blog hosting services to find hosting solution for their maiden personal blog. Some of the folks prefer free web hosting services, but as they realise the downsides of free hosting, they look for personal blog hosting services, with loads of features and plethora of benefits over free web hosting services.

Paid Blog Hosting versus Free Blog Hosting
Well, you can surely host your blog on Blogger.com, Wordpress.com and several other free blogging platforms, but there are downsides to all the free services. First of all, you’ll be forced to display the ads, which you may not want to. Secondly, the uptime guarantee and safety of your blog is never guaranteed by free blog hosting providers (obviously you can’t complaint about this, especially when you’re not even spending a single penny). So, if just simply want to host a personal blog, and share your views with other internet users then a free hosting service should suffice, whereas for those who plan to create a personal blog with vital info and market it to make some serious money, paid blog hosting is definitely the way to go.

Are Pricing and Features the only Two Considerations?
Initially whenever folks look at the personal blog hosting services offered by various hosting agencies all they bother about is pricing as well as the features offered. But, in the longer run, when you consider good blog hosting services, you should not only worry about pricing, and features, but also consider other aspects like reliability of host, downtime, money-back assurance and customer support. If your host doesn’t provide adequate customer support there’s no point in purchasing hosting plan from such a host even if it is available at an extremely cheap rate because if your blog is lying dead and you don’t know what to do with it, paying for hosting is just overhead and unfruitful.

Top 5 Things to Consider While Picking a Personal Web Hosting Provider
As mentioned earlier, there are other consideration apart from features and pricing to be considered while picking a personal web hosting plan, so let us take a look at the list of top 5 things to be kept in mind, apart from pricing, customer support, and features on hosting plan.

1. FTP and SQL Databases: Initially just one FTP account and SQL database may be more than enough to cater to your needs of hosting your personal blog, but as the popularity of your blog increases and you market it well, you may consider hiring a professional web developer and improving its design and functionality. During such times, you’ll need separate FTP access to be granted to the developer, and same applies in case you’ve a friend/partner who’s taking care of maintenance of the blog, customization of theme, taking daily data back-up and performing other tasks. So, it is advisable that you pick a personal blog hosting plan, which has multiple FTP account access (at least 5-10).
2. Support to Latest Technology: Sure thing you may start off with Wordpress as your blogging engine, but later on you may like to move on to advanced platforms like RailFrog, (which powers the infamous Twitter.com), CushyCMS, or something else to take care of content management needs of your ever-growing blog. So, you must ensure that your host offers support to latest version of PHP/MySQL, Ruby-on-Rails and all the latest offerings in the world of web technology. Remember, things become obsolete in few months, so you can’t survive with old stuff for long enough.
3. Freebies: You’re bound to get a lot of freebies such as one-click installation scripts, free search engine and directory submission and more. Yahoo! and GoDaddy may have great rapport in the web hosting arena, but their basic hosting package lack free stuff and literally anything, which may impress the novice level users.
4. Reliability (Minimal Downtime): Ouch! The mere thought of your money minting personal blog being down for several hours and hampering your revenues is extremely painful! And, if this repeats several times, you may surely lose your temper. Hence, it is advisable to pick a reliable host like JustHost, Yahoo!, GoDaddy, and the likes of them – don’t try your luck with those hosts who don’t have good credibility and past records of maintaining 99.9% uptime.
5. Hosting Multiple Domains, Domain Registration and Transfer Fee: Soon after your first personal blog gets famous, you may think about starting a few more. So, you must have the flexibility to host multiple blog from the same hosting account. Moreover, some day if you need to get your blog transferred to other host, you should figure out how much money you’d have to cough out in such a situation. It is advisable to keep domain registration and hosting separate so that in case you hosting provider runs to the hills, your domain is not in danger of extinction. Remember, you must always register your domain only with highly reliable registrars.

Top 3 Blog Hosting Service Providers in the Market
JustHost: When you consider the top 5 blog hosting service providers in the market, you’ll find that JustHost is currently the best deal with its 36 months hosting package costing you just about $3.95 per month, and it comes with free setup as well as free domain registration for the first year. JustHost is a highly reliable and experienced web hosting service provider that boasts of millions of satisfied customers, and a decade of successful operation.

WebHostingPad: WebHostingPad blog hosting services start from $3.96 per month, which is comparable to JustHost, but of course you don’t get the same level of reliability as that of JustHost. However, WebHostingPad offers features rich blog hosting package include one-click install scripts.

FatCow: FatCow is yet another reliable player in the web hosting arena, and they’ve been working hard on ensuring customer satisfaction since many years. They not only offer affordable blog hosting service, but also excellent customer support, and outsmart most of the other providers in terms of the advanced security and green hosting exercised in their data centre.

Note: You get unlimited hosting space, monthly bandwidth, and free set-up, along with 24/7 email and phone support, along with live chat support round the clock from all these 3 web hosting providers.