Now Reading ...Web Host is the Home of your Blog. You host everything there.
From your creativity to your innovation. From Nuts photos to Scary Movies. From Art to Rubbish. You can almost put anything into your web host, as long as they can contain it.
Choosing a reliable Web Host will save your day from the risk of error and downtime of the server. There is so many choice out there and a lot information that you can stuffed into your brain. But you have no need to confuse yourself by those information.
The normal 5 concerns when people choosing a web host is in this below list:
- Price
- Storage
- Bandwidth
- Features
- Customer Support
In my personal views, It should be like this:
- Customer Support
- Storage
- Bandwidth
- Features
- Price
It’s my old habits to put Price related terms at the bottom. But didn’t mean that I’m going to ignore it! 
Price also will become one of our concern in buying a web host, but not the first thing to hunt.
Customer Support
I believe, Customer Support from the web host must become the top of your concern. The reason is simple. Because you can tell you are buying a web host with a “human” than a machine.
You will get a human respond than a machine bot live chat. A good customer support will have a full support for our problem regarding the hosting.
Without a good customer support, the web host is just a piece of Junk that can’t solve the upcoming problem of your hosting and database.
I believe, our blog will have a lot of problem along the way. It’s impossible to tell that your blog won’t influenced by their server maintenance or database arrangement.
There is where the customer support comes to handle all the hassle. A good customer support will save a lot of your time by a quick respond to your questions and they will solve it quicker.
30 Money Guarantee back and 24-hours Technical Support is an undeniable services that every web host must have.
Storage
Notice this will become the largest temptation for us when choosing a web host. We always want to get the most out of our buck.
There is a lot of offer out there. Some even give you thousands of Gigabyte for a low price!
Well, this is where they suck your attention and make you forget about the other important things.
Just be careful. If you are going to blog like a problogger do, 100 Gigabytes is more than enough for 100.000 Posts!
Since you will embeded video from youtube or elsewhere, you have no need of Big Storage room for your blog.
Bandwidth
This one is the most important feature that you must seek. especially If you are a great Digger and Stumbler. You will need a big Bandwidth to support both of them.
The reason? Well, they are a Bandwidth Killer actually!
As soon as your story at digg get to the front page, digg users will come from all over the place to see your story and your bandwidth usage will explode on that current day.
The explosive traffic will make your blog traffic jam if your bandwidth is not big enough to handle them.
StumbleUpon also have the same case. When you write a god-sake good post, your post will receive lots of thumbs up from the peoples around the world. The effect is that the post will receive an immediate flux of traffic and overload your server for the god-sake!
A big bandwidth won’t influenced by those problem. 1000 ~ 3000 Gigabyte is suitable for this kind of blog.
Services Features
Feature also is one of our temptation in buying web host. We tend to buy more feature that we will never use it. The most crucial features that you should have for a normal blogging activities is not that much.
Below list will show you the crucial features that blogger must have on your webhost:
- E-Mail Spam Filtering and Unlimited Email Addresses Aliases
- Free Domain for life! <this one crucial>
- Can Host Unlimited Domain Name and create unlimited of subdomain
- Cron Jobs (For Automating Task, like Follow-up Email, Newsletters, etc)
- Full Script Supported (ASP, CGI, Perl, PHP, MySQL, etc)
- Fantatisco or One-Click Installation feature
- FTP enable for FTP uploads
- Log files Access
Price
Ok, price is also important. If you forget to check the price, don’t blame me to have a over-billed credit card statement! ;p
Reliable web host will cost you more than the normal web host do. Be careful, some web host just cost you more than what they can provide for you.
A normal price for reliable web host is around $8 a month. expensive? Naahh! Just save a cup of Starbucks Coffee for 12 days and you will be able to pay the one year fee.
Ok…
On the next post, I will review 2 3 big mamma web hosts in services, quality, and full-edge features capability. So stay tune!
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Leave a comment
(August 10, 2007, 12:51 am)
First of all, nice site!
My one and only advice, never believe anything that is written on Web Host Review Sites since most of them are fabricated, IMO.
I’ll go with these though:
Customer Support
Bandwidth
Storage
Price
Features
Are you hosted on Dream Host?
Reply to tabs(August 10, 2007, 1:23 am)
well, Stephen. Not all of them is fabribated, though…
Reply to Ken XuBasically, Customer Support, Bandwidth and Storage will be our top 3 concerns before price and feature.
Yes, I host my blog at dreamhost. You could see the green site logo at the sidebar!
btw, thanks for commenting, Stephen!
(August 10, 2007, 7:21 am)
Good points ken. But as tabs said that I’ll prefer bandwidth over space. Apart from that I’ll include one more option and that is reliability. You’ve got to see what the top shots are using and what they have to say about it.
Reply to TipsoSaurus(August 10, 2007, 9:55 am)
hi, I’m agree with your opinion. It’s looks like I’ve missed the reliability part. Thanks for the contribution to this post. I’m really appreciate it.
Reply to Ken Xu(August 10, 2007, 9:48 am)
@ken
No problem! My pleasure.
@TipsoSaurus
Yeah, bandwidth is much more important, cause even if you have tons of web space, it is just as useless if you dont have the bandwidth for them. Reliability actually should be number 1.
I’m currently hosted at lunarpages by the way, and I’m very satisfied. I’ve also tried globat and I won’t recommend it. 
Reply to tabs(August 10, 2007, 10:08 am)
I think customer service is a part of reliability of the web host. may be I have missed the big picture here. but at least i have point out the small part of reliability. ;p
Reply to Ken XuQuick responds to our needs and helpful to our problem reflected the reliability of the web hosting.
(August 12, 2007, 5:51 am)
Yes i agree with you guys bandwidth is more important than web space.Since most them prefer low cost hosting,above all factors cannot be satisfied by low cost hosting provider.
Reply to Webee(August 12, 2007, 6:34 am)
Bandwidth is definitely more important than space as you may not know when you can get tons of visitors. My recommendation is Bluehost, excellent service, Live chat available and also no down times.
Reply to Nirmal(December 31, 2007, 4:44 am)
If only I had seen this before choosing ANHosting. If you see that name anywhere, run. Talk about the most oversold bandwidth EVER.
Reply to Areeb Bajwa