If you read my article on How To Pick A Domain Name and you’ve registered a domain name, then the next step you’ll want to do is pick a web host. A web host is a place to put all your blog stuff at.
What do you mean?
A web host is a place where there are servers running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They consist of highly specialized servers that are meant to run constantly so your blog never goes down and all your readers will never have to miss your content ever. Well, almost never.
What is a server?
If you know what a computer is, then you know what a server is. A server is a super-duper computer. It can handle all your readers coming to your blog and reading your blog posts without slowing down. Hopefully it can handle the Digg effect.
What is the Digg effect?
Most likely you don’t have to worry about that now but it’s when a bunch of readers come to your blog to read one of your fantastic blog posts. The more readers that show up at your blog at the same time, the more stress your web host’s server experiences. However, you might never experience this but if you do you want to make sure your web host can handle it. If you do experience the Digg effect then sometimes you won’t really know how your web host can handle it until it happens.
Ok, so back to your hosting account. I use HostGator as my web host. Here’s a snippet from their home page on one of their more popular plans.
Obviously some of this is going to be geek speak to a lot of folks. But, the bottom line is not. In this Host Gator hosting plan summary, you can see for $7.95 a month you get all the above – WOW!! For setting up a WordPress blog, the above hosting plan is just fine. If you click on the More Info link you’ll be taken to a whole host of features the web host offers.
Here is a quick break down of what HostGator offers and we’ll stick with the “Baby” hosting plan. 
The next section we’ll look at is the Package Details. You can read more about each line item by clicking on the question mark in the first column of the list at HostGator’s website. The only thing I’ll point out here is the 24×7 support which is nice in case something bad happens you can call, chat online or email technical support at HostGator.
The next section you’ll see is the Domain / FTP Features.
In this section it’s good to note that Sub Domains is what allows you to have multiple blogs hosted at your web host. This is good so if you decide to create more blogs in the future you’ll be set to do that without spending an extra dime doing it. The FTP accounts allow you to transfer files from your computer to your web host computer (server). You’ll probably just use one for everything you need to do in the beginning.
The next section we’ll look at is the Supported Features section. A lot of what you see below might be a bit too technical for you at this time. Again if you’re interested in more details about each feature, you can click on the question mark in the far left column of the list. I will point out that the MySQL Databases is where all your stuff in your WordPress blog will be stored. If you’ve heard about databases, WordPress uses MySQL to store a lot of information about your blog in MySQL.
The next section is the Email section. Nothing to go over at this point regarding email setup.
The next section is the Control Panel Features. Below you’ll find cPanel and a demo link to view what cPanel has to offer. You will work in cPanel to check various statistics of your blog.
Fantastico is a tool that allows you to install WordPress and other software your web hosting plan provides. That’s about it for the Control Panel for now. Those two features – cPanel and Fantastico are the crux of what you’ll use to install and work with your blog.
The next section lists the Web / FTP Statistics that your web host will provide. To track how your blog is doing you’ll be able to use AWStats to see how many visitors you have to your blog every day, every week, every month, etc. There are many other statitistics that AWStats tracks and you’ll spend a lot of time in them analyzing where everyone is coming from, to your most popular content on your blog.
The final section is the E-Commerce section and the Purchase section. The E-Commerce features contain software that will allow you to have shopping carts on your webite or blog so people can order products securely from you, if you decide to go that route. Again, as far as purchasing what plan you need for your blog, I’ve concentrated on the Baby plan.
Although there is a huge list of features to consider, there are really just a few that we’ll concentrate on to get our blog up and running. In future posts about your domain name and your web host, I’ll provide video on setting up your hosting account and walking through some of the features you’ll use to get your blog up and running.
Summary
So for the beginning WordPress blogger, the important stuff to look at when purchasing a web host plan is the following:
- Server Uptime Guarantee
- Linux Web Hosting
- 24 x 7 Support by email, chat and phone – Call the tech support of the company during a time that is convenient for you to experience their responses and response time.
- A time period with a money back guarantee – This allows you to get out before a financial commitment on your part.
- Price of plan (depending on how much you’re prepared to spend this could be your primary concern)
- Google the web host name with the word review or reviews after it. You could also do the same search at Google’s Blog Search. For example, you could search on the following words:
- HostGator Review
- HostGator Reviews
- Host Gator Review
- Host Gator Reviews
- Web Hosts
- Web Hosting
- Web Hosting Reviews
- Web Hosting Solutions
- etc…
- Reviews by any of the top bloggers out there and their experiences with web hosts.
- Sub Domains – If at some point you decide to take on the feat of writing multiple blogs that you want to start yourself, then have free sub domains will allow you to start them quickly on the same hosting account.
- Look for the industry standard cPanel to manage the various aspects of your web host.
- Look for the industry standard Fantastico to manage installing software easily.
- Look for the industry standard AWStats to help you see statistics of your blog – who’s visiting, what are they reading at your blog, how long are they staying, etc.
If you’d like to find out more about web hosting and what people are talking about web hosting, visit the Web Hosting Talk forum.
Hi. I’ve been using 230mb.com. It is a brand new web host and their offers seems to be balanced. (5GB of disk space, 250GB of monthly transfer, 20 MySQL Db hosted in the same server with my defined user names, 20 ftp accounts which i can create, they have one click installer (i think it is fantastico) that supports wordpress, joomla, PHPBB3 and many others. It just less than $35 a year. What do you think about this 230mb web host offer?
First, thanks for commenting.
Sounds very inexpensive and hopefully that doesn’t translate into cheap – that is, cheap quality.
Just visiting their website I don’t like the fact I can’t get a hold of someone right now, when I’m at their website home page. At least I didn’t see it easily.
Hopefully their uptime is rock solid, IOW, in 365 days from you opening your hosting account, your site is available 365 days/yr, 24×7 or close to it.
If they need to do maintenance/downtime work, hopefully they give fair warning and for how long. And it should be an extremely short amount of time.
Is it speedy consistently for a long time. Do you have any of your website/blog visitors asking, “Why is your site so slow?”
Other than that, they should just run, run fast for a long time, and not bother you with a bunch of email about this and that. Payment receipt type emails are okay, which give you a way to keep reocrds that you paid $x.xx for a given time period.
One email a year would be okay from a host account saying, “We’re glad you’re here and appreciate your business, if you feel like this service has been good for you, please feel free to tell your friends, family, etc. Oh, by the way, we think your website/blog rocks!!” That would be an acceptable email from my hosting account.
Still, go over to http://www.webhostingtalk.com and ask some questions or do some of those Google searches I mention in this article.
Just remember, ultimately you have a lot of work to do creating and maintaining your website/blog, your hosting account should one of the last things you have to worry about.
My two cents. 🙂 Good Luck!!