Step 2: Choose a Reliable but Affordable Hosting Provider

So now that you have a domain, let’s host your blog (we have agreed that you need a self-hosted blog, remember? so no free hosting plans, please).

Why is this step important?

A good hosting choice is actually crucial. If you pick a good provider from the very start, you are lucky (I wasn’t when starting).

Web hosting directly influences your site user experience and its performance in Google search results pages. It determines the site speed and uptime (which means how often the site is working versus how often it is actually down and inaccessible for both your readers and search engine crawlers).

What does the term “bad hosting” basically mean?

• No or slow customer support: sometimes (often?) you will just have to ask a stupid question; if there is no response, you have made a bad choice;
• Frequent cases of hacker attacks and virus injections: many blogs are often injected with malware and viruses. Sometimes, this is the problem on your end (unreliable plugins, viruses on your computer. But more often than not, these are web hosting security issues.
• Bad uptime: which means your site is often down.

Which hosting providers do I recommend?

Here are the two I am using for my blogs and haven’t had problems so far. I am not using affiliate links to demonstrate I really recommend these two (without any revenue interest from my part):

• Bluehost.com (minimum package monthly price: $6.95)
• Hostgator.com (minimum package monthly price: $4.95)

I have tried other providers (not listed here) but I haven’t tried all of them. So there are obviously plenty of more reliable services. In case you are unaware of any, check the above ones.