Choosing A Host For Your Blog

Those already blogging have made their choice of web hosts while for those who are considering to blog, I wish to inform that you have a choice between free-hosting like Blogger.com and WordPress.com and non-free or paid hosting of your own. The second kind (paid hosting) is the subject of this blog. You can  search for and find many articles about free-hosted sites including the advantages and disadvantages of one platform against the others. Newbie bloggers are advised to try free-hosted sites to be able to get the feel of blogging as well as learn the plugin and widget technologies behind the popular blog platforms.

The succeeding discussions are for those who have finally decided to have their blogs hosted for a fee. It is very important that you make the right choice of a web hosting company from the start not only because you will be spending money out of your own pocket but also because moving your existing blogs to a new host is a very tedious task for anybody. You must consider the different factors in choosing the paid host for your site and you must only decide after careful consideration of the different offers you will get.

Among the important factors to consider in choosing your blog’s paid web host is the availability of support for the blog platform that you will use, the amount of disk space for your data storage, the allowable bandwidth usage for the traffic that your blogs will incur and the monthly hosting fee. Some other matters like the web hosting company’s track records, its current clientele and location of its servers must also weigh in your decision.

Many web hosting companies in our country are just resellers of those located in other countries. The Philippines is not a place of choice for locating web servers of many big companies  because our Internet Service Providers are, sorry to say, not reliable enough to make a guaranteed 24/7 or five-nine (99.999%) service availability. If you have a Mozilla Firefox browser, you can add the  Flagfox add-on, open some mission-critical entities like Google, Yahoo. etc. and you will see that none of them have servers being hosted or located in  the country.

The fact that many of local web hosting companies are mere resellers of big hosting companies located abroad should not prevent you from considering their services. It will be to your advantage, if the price is right, to have a local guy provide you with the technical service in the design, construction, set-up and maintenance of your blogsite.

NOTE: Your comments are welcome here but you may wish to proceed to AFTR Bloggers’ Forum for your questions and comments.