Things To Think About When You’re Looking For A Blog Host

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The Hosting Leap

The truth is you could have an idea for a blog right now and be writing the first post for that blog ten minutes from now. There are a number of services who exist to make that transition from “non-blogger” to “blogger” almost painless.

All this comes at a price, though. There’s not much control given end users over the design of their blog, beyond the superficial, and usually your blog exists as a subdomain on their servers.

Most blogs die as the bloggers behind them get bored, busy, or tired, but some go on. That’s when we arrive at what, for most of us, is the first big hurdle of our blogging lives:

The jump from the group-hosted amateur to the serious blogger, with their own URL and hosting service. This is a pretty trivial task once you’ve done a time or two, but the initial foray into the world of potential hosting providers is a big leap!

There are a few things to think about, and we’re going to hit them in rapid succession.

Reliability of Reach

They call it the world wide web for a reason, but some hosting services are larger and provide better service over a larger area. You want to be certain that your potential hosting service is reliable and fast wherever you expect your target audience to reside.

Almost all hosting providers will be fairly reliable, but some will almost always be better than others.

Reliability of Uptime

This is a mostly separate concern from reach, though it’s rare to find a host who’s bad at one yet good at the other. When your server is down, users can’t access your site. Servers do go down from time to time, it’s a fact of internet life, and it’s nothing to panic about. That said, especially for people who monetized blogs, lost uptime is lost money. If your server downtime is too high, it may translate to lost readers on your blog, too.

How much downtime is too much downtime?

As you can see in this list most hosting providers have uptime the averages over 99%, and 99.9% is attainable. There’s no reason you should ever settle for average uptime below 99%.

Security

Do a quick search to make sure your host has a reliable record of security. For most purposes, this simply means that your hosting service is very conscientious about keeping the software running (and running on) their servers up-to-date.

Ease of Use

One of the few tangible differences between most hosting providers is their backend. Some providers are great, providing users with numerous services and clear pathways to get to the functions you are looking for. Others are difficult to navigate, or offer very limited services.

GoDaddy, for example, has a back-end which is obviously designed to shunt users to screens offering upsells on various products, with no priority on user experience; they want you to have to click through as many screens as possible to perform any function you are attempting.

Any host which does not offer FTP/SSH access is probably best avoided.

Expense

Many of the hosting services which advertise most actively to novices are considerably more expensive, relative to services offered, than other hosting options. This is often made up for in extremely responsive customer service options.

If you want someone to talk you through any problems, it may be worth the extra expense, if you’re a confident DIY enthusiast, save yourself the money.

Other Concerns

All these factors should be on your mind,  but there may be others as well. For example, some hosting providers are green companies, or it might be important to you to select a host operating out of your home country.

The good news is there is plenty of help available out there! First Site Guide, we go into more detail on the host selection process (and more of the nuts and bolts), so feel free to take at our guide a look or ask us if you have more questions.

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