Hosting Your Blog

If you need to set-up and be in charge of your personal blog you will want a blog hosting service. However you will not find this specially, so you need a web hosting service that advertises support for the sort of blog you want.

Prior to signing up with such a service you should just ponder if a free blog created on one of the big blog sites like Blogger, WordPress.com, Posterous or Tumblr might satisfy your requirements. These allow you to rapidly setup a blog but you don't get the overall flexibility that is available with self-hosting your site.

The first thing to think about is the domain name. You will need this name when you sign up for a web hosting product and will need to make your mind up whether to register it through the website hosting company or through a 3rd party registration service. In respect of the day to day management of your site it doesn't make any difference but using a 3rd party registrar will most likely make it less complicated to move between hosting providers in the future, if you need to do so. If you utilize the hosting provider ensure that you own the domain and remember that even if there was no charge for the domain (i.e. part of the package) you will be required to pay the cost of this if you cancel the hosting, even during the period of any money back guarantee.

You'll find a variety of platforms you can use for a blog such as Movable Type, Textpattern or even Drupal (for larger blogs) but WordPress is the most common. You can find a huge number of plugins obtainable using which you can get your site to perform as you desire. In addition there are many themes to be had which means you can get the color scheme and layout of your site as you require. If you encounter any issues or want something different you will find a lot of assistance available online as there exists a large user base.

Having decided to set-up your personal blog you will need hosting and you may contemplate utilizing a free web hosting service. If you are new to blog hosting I would advise against doing this since there is always a draw back to free services. You cannot anticipate anything more than limited support, via email, nor should you anticipate any guarantees regarding downtime. In addition you are liable to have to install your blog manually which can be tricky if you don’t have any experience of what you are doing.

As a result you are best served by signing up with one of the main website hosting services the majority of whom offer technical support for blog software such as WordPress (but this does not apply to all of them so you need to do some research). Many offer a “One Click”, or similarly titled user friendly, install which means that you can have your blog up and running very quickly. Should you have any difficulties the host will provide technical support on a 24/7 basis.