Host Your Blog – Benefits of Self Hosted Blogs & Recommended Hosting Service Providers

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If you are starting off your blog or your website, and have never managed sites before, it might be a great idea to start off with a good hosting service provider like Wordpress .

Wordpress by itself is more than just a host. And I have learned this from my own experience as well as that of fellow bloggers & webmasters.

• Wordpress provides you a great blogging software – takes minutes to set up, easy to, quick to upgrade
• Wordpress keeps enhancing their software – you will not be left behind when it comes to technical advancement of your blog’s features
• Wordpress community is an active developers’ forum – the Wordpress community actively participates in creating themes , plugins , widgets as well as providing feedback for future developments
• I have made a small compilation of a handful of essential free plugins for blogs
  
• Wordpress hosting is stable – their infrastructure is so robust that there is no downtime for your blogs. Which means that you do not lose readers

Given so many great things, why would anyone want to move away from a hosting provider & take on the added work of hosting their own blogs? And who are the right people who should host their own blogs?

• If you want to sell products or services from your blog, you would need complex integration with 3rd party systems & technologies. You can do that with custom coding. Many hosts do not allow high degree of custom programming
• If you want to display ads & earn money from either CPA ads or CPC ads or CPM ads, you need custom themes that can only be deployed if you are hosting your own blog
• If you want to design & implement your own theme, that is not part of the standard package of your blog host, you need to host your own blog
• Implement off-the-shelf plugins from any sources. Plugins are small pieces of codes that perform specific functions. Many programmers write & freely distribute plugins that could solve your specific business needs. Like a language translation plugin for example! When you host your own blog, you can download plugins from wherever you want & install them in your blog – no questions asked
• Building your Brand – it takes years to build a brand, reputation & a devoted readership. All associate the author with the blog. You would like to build your blog on your domain & provide your readers all that is required to build & grow your reputation

Here are a few points you need to keep in your mind while you host your own blog:

• Choose your host well. You don’t have to spend excessively on your hosting service, but a few things that are very important are their server uptime, availability of the latest PHP & MySQL databases, number of add-on domains allowed, number of sub domains allowed & their back-up procedures.

Some of the most reputed & very affordable hosts for the blogging community are:

Blue Host , Host Monster , Host Gator , ImHosted , Fat Cow & Lunar Pages . All of them does a great job is providing all the technologies required to host your blog. They take care of maintenance & upgrades.

Most of them would also move your blog from their current location to the new one & ensure that you are all set up right.

• The idea situation is where you dont have to move your blog to new hosts over & over again. So take your time to choose the right host. I have made a few recommendations but you do your homework well. Remember, any move is costly & risky. You may lose data & content.

• After you migrate your blog over to your new host, make sure all your Categories, Tags & Plugins are working correctly. The categories & tags are the ones that run into problems while migrating