Blogging as a Publishing Business: Choosing a Service Provider

June 26, 2007 by John Hewitt

There are thousands of services worldwide that will be happy to host your web site. Before you
choose a provider, check to see if they are compatible with your blogging software. Wordpress, for example, currently requires PHP version 4.1 or greater and MySQL version 3.23.23 or greater. They also recommend Apache servers but do not require them. Movable Type requires Perl version 5.004_05 and recommends 5.6.1 or above. It also requires one of several database programs. Whatever blogging software you need, but sure your web provider can handle it. Some other considerations are:

Storage Space

Does the service provider give you enough space to comfortably host your blog? If you plan, for the most part, to stick to text entries then this will rarely be a problem for you. Almost any package will provide you with enough space for a large number of text entries. If, however, you intend to constantly be assign photos and other graphics to your site, the amount of space provided will eventually become an issue.

Bandwidth / Traffic

Bandwidth controls how much information your site will be able to download to users every month. This is another issue that probably won’t affect you unless you intend to use a lot of graphics on your site. Text downloads simply aren’t too demanding.
Statistical Tracking

Most providers offer some sort of statistical tracking for your site. At minimum, their tracking should give you the following information:

Unique visitors
Number of visits
Pages
Hits
Bandwidth
Hit totals for individual pages
Incoming Links
Search Engine hits and search terms

There are plenty of other statistics, and the more you can get, the better your analysis of how your site is doing and how it can be improved will be.

Included Blogging Software

Many providers now include “one-click” installation packages for your blogging software. They make it simple to get a blog up and running using a package such as WordPress. If they do provide this, make sure they use the most up-to-date version. Some service providers never bother to update their software (iPowerWeb comes to mind).

Recommended Providers

Some quality, affordable providers that have a good reputation and simple blogging software installation include Blue Host, Midphase, DreamHost, and Laughing Squid.

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