After years of throwing ideas under the rug, you’ve finally decided to start your own blog. Congrats! A blogosphere is a great place where you get to express your creative ideas and deepen your knowledge on various topics. Blogging is also a great way to earn money once you learn how to attract traffic. As more and more people become aware of your well-established brand, you will often show up in search results. The formula is simple – more traffic, more opportunities to earn.
Before that happens, though, you’ll need to find the ideal type of web hosting for your blog. It may sound as simple as picking a plan and paying for it, but it’s a bit more complex in reality.
Blog Hosting for Dummies
As mentioned, starting a blog is a great way of personal growth that might even evolve into a successful business brand. As a newcomer, things might be confusing as you start. However, as you learn more things about the web and blogging as well, you will get plenty of opportunities to rank your blog online higher.
A large part of this depends on finding a good blog hosting provider. Setting up a blog yourself is difficult for someone who’s not familiar with websites. But don’t worry – you can pick a web hosting platform such as WordPress that can save you time with its one-click installs. Once you’ve set your blog up, you can proceed to look for the ideal web hosting solution for your blog.
Think of web hosting as a storage and management service for your blog. All the information on your blog is safely tucked away online and keeps your blog running. It’s an essential piece of the Internet – without web hosting, the world wide web as we know it wouldn’t be able to exist.
There are different types of web hosting that suit different blogging or website platforms. The list below features the most popular blog and web hosting solutions you can get.
- Free hosting
- Shared web hosting
- VPS
- Cloud hosting
- Colocation
- Etc.
Your choice depends on your blog. Each one comes with a set of pros and cons you should consider carefully. Going cheap might be something you’re looking for, but you should never do it on behalf of losing key features such as security. You need something that offers the best bang for the buck that will grow as your brand grows. Once you decided on the right hosting type, we recommend you to read detailed web hosting platforms reviews at Easy Hosting Guide to see which one suits your budget.
Free Hosting
As the name implies, free hosting comes free of charge and may be the best testing ground for new bloggers. If you want to test the water and see how blogging works it allows you to do that and see if blogging is really for you.
Of course, it comes with many strings attached. First and foremost, you have limited disk space and resources, no live support, no email service, and speed could be a problem. Still, if your budget is a problem and you can’t move a tier or two up, it’s the perfect way to test things.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting might be your best bet if you’re new to the blogosphere. Most solutions come on cheap and with a free SSL certificate. Shared hosting means that your blog shares space and resources with other blogs and websites on a server for only a fraction of the price of VPS hosting, for example.
This type of hosting requires almost no technical know-how. It is highly affordable, but speed might be a problem. Since you’re sharing a server with others, whenever traffic goes wild the speed might come down a bit. We’re not talking about the speed of a snail, but some may find it concerning, especially if you’re starting a blog for profit.
Most shared hosting solutions come with free email addresses, unlimited disk space, free WordPress apps, and most likely a 24/7 direct customer service line. As we already said, it’s great for beginners.
VPS
Virtual Private Server hosting is more expensive than shared hosting but it has key advantages over it. Since you’re paying for your own mini-server within a cluster of servers, you get better speed, enhanced privacy, and better control over your virtual space.
This type of blog/web hosting is ideal for those who have already outgrown their shared server. If your blog starts attracting a higher number of visitors, you’re better off with VPS. Your site’s speed won’t suffer as being on a shared server, and we all know how important speed is for popular blogs and websites.
Of course, VPS isn’t as affordable as shared servers, but you could find great deals online. Keep in mind that even if you go with shared hosting at first, you can upgrade to VPS later.
Cloud Hosting
If you want to invest in the future and plan to use your blog for revenue, cloud hosting is the best choice. Larger projects can benefit from cloud hosting the most with the simplicity of shared blog/web hosting.
Compared to other web hosting types, cloud hosting has extra features that make it ideal for everyone on the web. It offers great security, dedicated resources, regular backups so you don’t lose any data, and most importantly, 99.9% uptime. Unlike shared servers where speed can be an issue, cloud hosting promises little to no downtime for your new blog, and that’s highly important for starters.
Of course, it doesn’t come cheap. However, the extra bucks are worth paying for if you want a piece of future-proof tech.
The last blog hosting solution on our list, collocation, is not something we’d recommend for newbies who have no idea how hosting works. Colocation means you rent space in a data center, bring your own hardware, set it up, and run things from there. Unless you’re a tech whiz who can do all of this, it’s not worth the investment.
Which One Should I Pick?
That’s up to you. Set your priorities straight from the beginning – shared blog/web hosting is ideal for newcomers. If you expect a lot of traffic, cloud hosting is a much better solution. Check your budget and see what suits you best while keeping in mind the pros and cons of each. There are many options at your disposal so choose wisely.
