Unless you opt for a service like Blogger, you need a web hosting provider to run your blog. Hosting offerings exist for all budgets. Favor the bottom rung of the price range ladder while still aiming for quality providers. Spending as little as you can on hosting in the beginning is the key to keep your blogging expenses to a minimum before your blog has proven itself. Various kinds of hybrid and complex hosting arrangements are available from hosting providers, but the spectrum can be roughly divided into the following four types of hosting plans.
• Shared hosting: Up to hundreds of sites from many different customers are hosted on the same web server. The hosting provider takes care of managing and maintaining the server, while the customer tends to have limited access to system administration tools and little flexibility in terms of what can be installed on the machine. Often running you only a few dollars a month, shared web hosting is the most inexpensive option. • VPS (virtual private server): The resources of a powerful server are divided
between a handful of customers through virtualization software. Each customer gets their own virtual server running in a virtual machine that uses a proportional share of the physical resources that are available on the host machine. This option is more expensive than shared hosting, but it also provides you with much better and more predictable perfor- mance. It can be provided as an unmanaged service, in which the customer needs to take care of installing and maintaining the server’s software, or as a managed service, wherein the staff handles the system administration for you.
Figure 5—Using a custom domain with Blogger
• Dedicated servers: A server is entirely dedicated to you. Just like VPS hosting, dedicated servers come in managed and unmanaged forms, depending on the provider. Some people even go so far as to provide their own machines that are hosted in a local data center as part of a so-called
colocation arrangement.
• Cloud computing: Computing resources are provided and billed based on usage. You could rent three instances (think the equivalent resources of three dedicated servers) an hour and switch back to a single instance an hour later when the traffic spike is gone. The value of cloud computing mainly resides in the ability to easily scale your computing needs without requiring a datacenter investment upfront. The cost scales accordingly with the resources you need.
Unless you already rent web servers and have experience working with them, start with shared hosting. Without a doubt, it’s both the most inexpensive and the easiest way to get started with self-hosted blogging. Keep in mind, though, that shared hosting is not as reliable or as fast as the other options, and that you may eventually get kicked out (I was several years ago) if your blog starts experiencing heavy traffic on a daily basis. For the time being, which may be many months, this option should do the trick.
Do your homework when it comes to these kinds of services, and be aware of the many fake reviews posted by some unscrupulous affiliate marketers who are after the hefty commissions hosting companies provide for referrals.
Companies that I have personally used and feel confident in recommending are described in the following paragraphs.
For shared hosting I recommend HostGator or Bluehost.5 They’re inexpensive and generally reliable (even though virtually all shared hosting companies tend to oversell and overcrowd their servers). It’s also worth noting the official list of recommended WordPress hosting companies at wordpress.org/hosting. For unmanaged VPS, Linode is hard to beat.6 For managed VPS, both ServInt and LiquidWeb are decent choices (albeit fairly expensive ones).7
How about dedicated servers? You don’t really need to look at these options quite yet; nevertheless, SoftLayer (unmanaged) and again ServInt (managed) are both excellent choices.8
Finally, the king of cloud computing is Amazon AWS,9 with other providers such as Rackspace and SoftLayer also offering popular cloud-based solutions.10 An honorable mention goes to companies that specialize in WordPress hosting and provide you with WordPress.com-like simplicity and convenience despite allowing virtually the same degree of flexibility you’ll find with self-hosted WordPress.
WP Engine, ZippyKid, and Page.ly are reputable choices,11 but they offer a premium service that is priced accordingly. If your blog were to become extremely popular, you may also consider the expensive WordPress.com VIP option at vip.wordpress.com.
3.2
Configure Your Domain Name
Regardless of your blogging platform, you need to ensure that the domain name you registered is properly configured. If you are using a hosted service like WordPress.com or Tumblr,12 simply follow the instructions provided by your vendor. If you are self-hosting WordPress, Jekyll, or different software, pay close attention to the following instructions.
5. hostgator.comand bluehost.com, respectively. 6. linode.com
7. servint.netand liquidweb.com, respectively. 8. softlayer.com
9. aws.amazon.com 10. rackspace.com/cloud/
11. wpengine.com, zippykid.com, and page.ly, respectively.