How to Choose the Right Web Hosting for Your Blog

Updated on by Hosting, Guides & Tutorials

One of the first steps when starting your new blog is to find a good web hosting service. This should not pose a problem once you know what to look out for.

But with so many web hosts out there and many features to choose from, you might find yourself overwhelmed.

And there are various considerations to take into account. In this post, we highlight some factors to help you pick the perfect web hosting service for your blog.

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Reliability

The reliability of a web host is crucial and will determine the uptime of your blog. You want a hosting service that guarantees minimal downtime for your blog. Most hosting services promise 99.9% uptime and there’s no reason you should go for anything less.

A reliable hosting service will also be fast. This means your blog will load fast and provide a good experience for your readers. A fast loading blog is also good for your SEO.

Customer Service

A good hosting company should guarantee reliable customer service and technical support. You want a company that will provide you support right at the moment you need it.

One way to determine the reliability of a hosting company is to give them a phone call or send them an email just to see how they respond.

Supported Features

The hosting features you need will mostly depend on your type of blog. For example, if you’re starting a WordPress blog, you’ll need a hosting service that meets the minimum requirements for WordPress.

Another feature you should look out for is bandwidth allocation (some hosting companies refer to it as file transfer). Bandwidth is just a measurement of accessibility between the public and your website files. For example, when someone views your website, they are spending your bandwidth.

The bandwidth you spend will depend on the kind of blog you have and the traffic you receive. As a rule of thumb, go for a hosting company that provides unlimited bandwidth (although it’s never really that unlimited).

Storage space/disk allocation is another important feature to look out for. If you’ll be storing large files in your blog, you’ll need a hosting service that provides you large storage space. Typically, most blogs do not exceed the “unlimited storage” offered by most hosting companies.

Web Hosting Packages Offered

Basically, there’re 3 kinds of hosting packages to consider for your blog: Shared hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers.

The hosting package you go for will largely depend on your budget and the kind of blog you are starting. When starting out, shared hosting should be fine.

Shared Hosting Packages are the most common – many websites you visit use shared hosting. Shared hosting simply means you’ll be sharing the same web server with other users. This is fine for most blogs depending on the size of the web server, its hardware, drive space capacity, bandwidth, RAM, and processing speed.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) refers to a different kind of shared hosting where you share the web server with fewer users. For example, if in shared hosting you were sharing with 300 other users, in VPS you might be sharing with 50 other users.

Dedicated Servers are designed for users who want to host their websites on their own private servers – no sharing with other users. Dedicated servers are ideal for larger websites with greater amounts of traffic. Though expensive, the advantages of dedicated servers are quite huge: Higher uptime, faster page loading, faster processing for FTP, downloads, uploads and basically all other server activity; simply because the resources are dedicated to one user.

Conclusion:

Basically, the hosting service you choose will depend on the kind of blog you’re starting and your budget. However, it’s important to check out reviews from other users before settling on a web host. And if you’re on a tight budget, you might want to look for discount coupons to help you save.

Best WordPress Hosting

Check out the our guide on choosing the best hosting for your WordPress website here:

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