Things You Need to Know About Personal Website Hosting
Overview
Basically, personal web hosting refers to hosting personal web pages or small websites/blogs over the internet. More often than not, people who’re fond of establishing their online identity wish to create personal web pages and small portfolios in form of personal websites/blogs.
The Purpose
The main aim of a personal website is to unveil your personal identity and possibly your distinct qualities and business skills to the world, so as to harness the opportunities like freelancing, coaching, taking music classes, and offering writing, designing, SEO, programming or other forms of personal services. But, this doesn’t necessarily mean that folks don’t launch massive personal websites that attract huge traffic and contain hundreds of pages of informative data and media files.
How much does it really cost?
Well, in case you’re wondering as to how much money you’ll end up spending paying for personal web hosting charges, you’d be amazed to know that there are hosting vendors who offer personal website/ web page hosting at as low as $0.99/month and include all the things that are necessary to host a simple website. Of course you must not expect any of the features offered by advanced shared hosting packages, in a basic personal web hosting package offered at extremely low cost.
However, this doesn’t mean that people don’t buy expensive personal web hosting package. Many a time, website owners require all sorts of advanced features and free goodies, so they don’t mind paying $5-$7 per month towards hosting charges. Hence, the cost of the personal website hosting services may vary drastically. On most occasions, people look for cheap personal web hosting services because they just intend to host simple web pages.
Free Web Hosting versus Personal Web Hosting
The free web hosting services can also offer you more or less the same facilities that personal web hosting service providers do. However, the level of reliability of the free web hosts is pretty low. You don’t get any dedicated support in case of any tech problems, and you can never complain about downtimes, because it is a free service. On the other hand, the personal web hosting services come with dedicated customer support, and high uptime guarantee.
Moreover, if you opt for free web hosting services, you’ll be forced to place ads of the site sponsors (they make revenues out of ads so that they maintain profitability and offer hosting services for free). But, such a problem is non-existent in case of personal web-hosting services, because you’re paying for the hosting charges and you don’t have any obligation to place unwanted ads on your web pages. Remember, this is extremely important if you intend to monetize from your website.
Selecting cheap personal web hosts
The choice again rests with you, and you can pick a small personal web host that offers all the necessary services or go with a bigger host. As far as the pricing is concerned, you may find the same features at more or less the same price, but selection of personal web hosting service providers is not limited to the features offered in the hosting package and its subscription cost. The track records, expertise in the field, awards and achievements and the uptime guaranteed by the company in past few years will clearly reflect their efficiency and reliability. However, this doesn’t mean the new upcoming personal website hosting providers are not reliable enough, just because they don’t have lot of track records to back-up their claims.
Does Personal Website Hosting Necessarily Involve Technicalities and Coding
At first, you might be misled that personal website hosting may involve lot of technicalities and hours of programming, design and coding work. But, to make the life of website owners easier, web hosting agencies offer professional-looking templates, with the help of which, you can easily set-up your website within few minutes or few hours at the most.
As a matter of fact the best personal web hosting providers offer one-click installation scripts, hundreds of free templates, website builder, cPanel and MySQL database wizard so that the customers (website owners) don’t need to break their head with complex technical tasks. This helps them in taking care of the set-up and maintenance tasks with just few clicks. All you need to do is to learn how to use the free tools provided by your host, and how to maintain your website with the help of the Admin/Control panel provided.
Monetizing on Personal Web Hosting
While you can pick personal web hosting services to host your personal website/blog or web pages over the internet just to create your online identity, it is possible to generate a good side-income with the help of your website.
Having set-up your website, it is time to load it with some top-notch informative content that others would be interested in reading. You should write upon latest topics that are of interest to worldwide audience rather than just a small portion of internet users from a particular country.
Even useful tutorials can turn out to be worthy enough to attract a decent traffic to your website. With little SEO, and marketing of your site, you’re good to go and generate some revenues with ads.
You can subscribe to contextual advertising services like ClickBank, Google AdSense, Chitka, AdBrite, Kontera, Text-link ads and the likes of them. Whenever a visitor arrives at your website and clicks on any of these ads displayed at that time, the advertiser pays for it, and the amount that you receive varies depending upon the advertising service.
You can also make good money with the help of affiliate marketing programs, and even static ads placed on your website (fixed price on daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis).
Areas of Concern
Those who’re relatively inexperienced in this field must be careful enough not to reveal sensitive information like your Google AdSense Ad code, login credentials and passwords to anybody who claims to be from the tech/customer support team of your hosting provider.
There have been several cases in past, wherein fake emails closely resembling the email address of a webhosting provider’s customer support team have been sent to the beginner level users, asking them for their password, or PayPal password, credit card details or other confidential information, just for the sake of verification.
And, of course you know what’s coming next, don’t you? With the help of such confidential information, the hackers have taken all the money from PayPal account, or misused the credit cards of the customers and the blame has gone to the personal web hosts. However, at the end of the day, customers turn out to be the loser, because they can never prove anything against the web hosts, as the actual email address of the sender turns out to be different from the email address of the support team of the web host.
Comparing Various Personal Web Hosting Providers
Comparing the rates and features offered by various personal web hosts can always help you in saving money. However, you must not keep the budget to be the top priority if you plan on building a bigger website that will attract lot of traffic.
A small personal web hosting agency may not offer you with everything that you require, so you must look out for better options, rather than simply picking whatever you get right away.
You’ll have to be picky enough to find the best personal web hosting provider and doing some online research can greatly help the cause. Remember, you must not go by the sweet reviews written on the website of your potential vendor, but rather read the unbiased reviews given on third-party review sites.
Avoiding the Misery
No matter how good the features of a personal web hosting package may appear to be, if you read negative reviews, which clearly state that the particular host is not reliable, or there are issues with their support team, it is never going to be worth investing on such a web host. At the end of the day, you’ll definitely require some kind of assistance, and you won’t like to see your website down for long hours. Therefore, to avoid such misery, you must pick only those web hosts that have maintained great track records in past. Even if a particular web host hasn’t got too many positive reviews, it should not be a matter of concern. But, even if you see a few negative reviews, you must be wary and try to stay away from such hosting providers.
In a Nutshell
The choice of picking your personal web host completely depends upon you, though you should keep the above-mentioned points in mind to ensure that pick a reliable, affordable and trustworthy personal web host that can meet all your requirements and provide the necessary assistance, whenever the need arises.