How to Get the Best Deal on Blog Hosting

If you’re serious about blogging, you need your own web hosting. Period. You can get by on free services like Blogger or Wordpress.com if you want, but, sooner or later, you’ll suffer from your lack of control. You site may go down and you’ll have no recourse but to pick up the pieces and start over somewhere else.

Unfortunately, web hosting is a cut-throat business. For every halfway decent host, there are a hundred lousy ones that are only interested in ripping you off (trust me, I used to work for one). Here are a few tips to keep in mind when looking for the best deal.

1. Know your needs. If you plan on running a Wordpress blog, for example, you’ll need a MySQL database and a server that can run PHP. Other considerations include storage and bandwidth capacity. Most hosts offer much more than the bare minimum, but it’s good to know exactly what you need before they try to sell you something you don’t.
    
2. Shop around. If you find a hosting package that offers decent value, chances are good that there’s another one out there that offers more. Keep looking to get a feel for the market so you can be confident in your final choice. If they’re asking more than $7 or $8 a month for general hosting, you can definitely do better.
    
3. Check their reputation. Any host that’s been around awhile will have a few negative comments, but you can usually tell the really bad ones by sheer volume. Type the host’s name into Google along with “complaints” or “reviews” and read the first page or two of results. Pay particular attention to trends. Do people consistently mention lousy customer support? Is there a lot of downtime? If you hear the same complaint from several independent sources, it’s probably legitimate.
    
4. Prepay for a lower rate. Much like buying in bulk, you can often pay more up front to pay less in the long run. Considering that the most successful blogs are several years old, it’s well worth the investment.
    
5. Find specials to get a better deal. Ideally, you want to find a good deal without resorting to limited time offers. Once you’ve found a good deal, though, there’s nothing wrong with making it even better with coupons and promo codes.
    
6. Bundle your domain name registration. This is a popular add-on that can easily save you a few bucks if you don’t already own your domain. If a potential host doesn’t offer free domain registration, be sure to add at least $9/year to their best price for a true comparison. If they do offer domain registration, make sure that you retain ownership of the domain in case you decide to cancel later.
    
7. Don’t bother with other options unless they’re free. Once you have a domain name, sufficient web space and bandwidth, and the necessary management tools, everything else is gravy. Only get add-ons to your hosting service if they’re free or you’re absolutely sure you need them. Like impulse buys in line at the grocery store, they’re mostly there to milk you for more money.

It’s worth noting that I followed this process myself when I had to move my website. I eventually decided on a two-year prepaid hosting account with free domain registration through Bluehost. Altogether, I paid $166.80 ($6.95/month) and have been very pleased with their service thus far.

I use A-plus.net, and so far the site has only crashed once when an article made it onto the front page of digg and got 40,000 hits in one day, but it only crashed for an hour or two.

Fortunately I had my site set up by someone who knew what he was doing, and so far I’ve had very few problems. What I’m deathly afraid of is the site crashing and then me not knowing what to do. i know very little about building websites — i’m definitely technically challenged in that arena. The recent fire at the building that shut down technorati and other major web 2.0 companies did nothing but reinforce my fears.

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