I’ve been running quite a few articles and posts about the benefits of maintaining your own web hosting and not relying on the free hosting offered by companies like Google/Blogger and WordPress.com. I’ve heard reports of blogger’s seeing posts and comments deleted, wrought by both Google and WordPress.com. Free hosting gives you very limited rights to your content. If your blog means anything to you, or you deal with controversial topics, you should definitely look into registering your own domain and hosting your site on your own paid-for hosting.
I also recommend that you do some research into owning and managing your own site, before taking the leap. Hosting one’s own blog– using FTP, cPanel, WordPress software, Fantastico, and MySQL databases– can be a little daunting without some education to support you.
As far as web hosting, I highly recommend Hostgator. (My affiliate link for Hostgator is in my sidebar). They are an excellent company, and Ihave had NO problems with them at all. I just love them! I had Bluehost for a year– what a nightmare! The constant “CPU Quota Exceeded” errors, the constant downtime… my visitor stats were very low, and if someone Stumbled one of my posts, that would activate the CPU Quota Exceeded errors all over again, causing all my blogs to go down. Grr!
Reviews are important (but not the final word, mind you) when it comes to researching web services. Web Hosting Rating has some good stats on the various web hosts (I didn’t see Hostgator listed there, though), and includes reviews from users. If you are looking for new hosting, this site may prove useful for comparing reviews, rates, space, and etc. And they have an articles page for various tips on changing web hosts, too.
One quick note when going to review sites– always be sure to do your homework and get second opinions, etc. Sometimes reviews can be “rigged,” so it always helps to take into consideration the reviews of a friend or someone you know, than a total stranger online. Just my two cents.
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I have been thinking about that, but my main issue is with that is how would you know which is a good deal for your price and where should you buy your domain?
There are number of registrars who sell domain names: GoDaddy.com, eNom, Google sells them through eNom, Network Solutions, to name a few. Most domain names cost about $10, but privacy (that is, concealing your name, address, and phone number) is sometimes extra. I was paying about $25 a year per domain with GoDaddy, until I decided to go woth eNom through Google– costs me $10 a year and includes privacy.
As far as web hosts, a quick search will give you some names. I’ve had a few hosts– WizzerdWerks, Bluehost, Dreamhost, and Hostgator. While there were pros and cons with all of them, the best for me is Hostgator. If you do a search for “Hostgator” or even “web hosts” in my search engine bar here, you’ll find more information on that.