Getting a good webhost for your blog

By Bruce · Saturday, June 13th, 2009

When you buy a new or used car, you want to make sure that the engine under the hood works efficiently and gives you the power you need to navigate around on the streets. The same goes for when you put up a blog on the internet. You want to make sure you have a great webhost that “powers” your blog so that everything runs smoothly. People take for granted that hosting your blog website is a simple decision, but it is quite the contrary.

We often hear of too many “horror” stories about a website “going down” for and unspecified time. What can that mean to you your potential profits? You certainly cannot afford to be down even for one minute!

Let’s look at what makes a great webhost company.

First, make sure the web host company has a great record of customer support. They should be available round the clock 7 days a week. They should either have live chat or telephone access. And when they do respond to your support request, they must resolve your problem within 20 minutes. I use that as my rule of thumb as a reasonable time frame to make my “problem” go away.

Second, the speed and reliability is another important factor. Make sure you know the “uptime” of their servers. If they can prove they have 99.5% or better uptime, you are good to go. You also need to check on the bandwidth per month you are allowed. Depending on how much you do uploads or downloads, this can be a factor.

Third, make sure you know that the web host company has “redundent” servers. In other words, they must have several levels of back up computers that pick up from each other in case one computer goes “down.” Typically, there are at least one back up computer server for every server they have. If anything ever happens to one server, the back up goes “live” immediately and you never notice the drop.

Most likely you are going to have “shared” hosting unless you want to pay extra for your own server space. By shared, we mean that, your account with the agreed space and speed are going to be paired up with many other users on the same server. It is normally not a bad thing….the company just wants to maximize every inch of space and “pack” all their customers in neat packages next to each other on the hard drives of the servers. The only drawback in this situation is that, if you have one “bad apple” of a shared customer who spams or over uses their bandwidth or space inappropriately, they can affect performance on your website.

Lastly, make sure you are paying a reasonable monthly price for your service. Stay away from “free” services. They are usually unreliable and do not have the speed capability to handle your site. Support for free web hosts are usually nil. Average monthly pricing usually goes from $18 per month to as high as $50 per month.

When you plan on making your blog give you the return on investment, don’t skimp on the webhost. Make sure they are reputable and check out their performance record and find out if they had any lawsuits against them or bad reports with the online BBB.