Blog Web Hosting: 5 Points to Consider Before Buying a Hosting Account

Many of our readers have sent emails from time to time asking for help with various aspects of blogging, blog hosting and blog hosting software. One of the most common mistakes, that we observed, most of them were making was not to check what their blog web hosting company was offering before they purchased an account with them. This article will take you through some of the most common features that you must check before you decide to host your blog with any hosting company.

Blogs could be of many types. Most popular and commonly seen blogs are news blog, technology blog, video blog, internet marketing blog etc,. Lets run through a list of items you should consider when searching for blog hosting company. [Note: These items may not help you decide if a hosting company is good or bad, but only help you ensure you get everything required to smoothly run your blogging software.]

» Web Space
Enough web space should be available to initially upload and install the blogging software and then depending on the type of blogging you will do, ample web space should be available for your blog site to grow without any pain. If you intend to upload lot of videos in your blog, you may want to consider buying yourself at least 1-2GB of space initially and scale it up when more space is required.

» Bandwidth
Bandwidth is not paid much attention when a hosting account is purchased. Imagine your site gets dugg every now and then, it will then consume lot of bandwidth. Consider the number of visitors you expect to visit your blog on a monthly basis and buy a package accordingly. Most hosting companies offer 20-30GB of monthly bandwidth which is quite enough for most blog sites.

» Hosting Platform
Since most of us use Linux OS for our blogging software, it’s most often LAMP combination that we must be opting for. First check the readme file or documentation of your blogging software and make a note of the version numbers of Apache, MySQL and PHP. Then contact the hosting company you have on mind and check if their hosting platform matches your requirements. Secondly, since many bloggers do lot of SEO with their blogs, Apache must be mod_rewrite enabled and other things you will keep in mind are:

• Site should be able to send emails using PHP.
• You should be able to upload large files (say 2MB) to your site using PHP.
• Server must support htaccess file in your site and overrides must be enabled.
• At least one Web Statistics software such as AWstats must be available.
• Hot link protection, Custom Error Pages and URL Redirects must be available.

» Site Backup
Backup must be taken on regular basis and your hosting company should be able to restore the site from the backup in minimal possible time. In an event of a server getting crashed, your hosting company should be able to restore the backup to a different server and restore the service.

» Technical Support
Hosting company must provide 24×7 support on chat and through ticket based system as well. Check for their reputation by visiting web hosting forums and search by company name for any known history of bad service and support.

The 5 points that we mentioned above are only some of the most important things one must consider before making a purchasing decision. Please feel free to contact us (Email is Raj at bloghash dot com) for any suggestions and recommendations for your blog web hosting.

You have something to add? Any tips for our readers? Please post your comments!