My Inexperienced Users’ Guide to Webhosting
Web hosting used to be a service that can be had through an intermediary. But as more and more individuals go into self-publishing with blogs and personal websites, the more intrepid home-based publishers are now being presented with a myriad of choices on where to host their blog or website.
My advice is to seek three things. Price, guarantee of availability, and word-of-mouth recommendation.
Price is always a consideration, as self-publishing may not necesarily be expensive. Shared hosting will meet your needs, but you need to know that it means that there may be more of you sharing the same webspace than you think. The downside here is if you chance upon a webhost that is not as secure as the average provider, your site can go down even if its another site that gets hacked.
Guarantee of availability is knowing how often in a year your site can go down within the stated service level agreements presented by your potential webhost. Self-publishers do not really need webhosting that can offer 99.999% uptime reliability with the accompanying hefty price. Cheap web hosting doesn’t necessarily mean frequent downtime. A web hosting service that guarantees 99.6% uptime means that you can be down only for as long as one weekend in a year, and that they’re going to get your site back up by Monday morning.
But if you know several other people who have gone out and actually bought hosting on their own with their trusty credit cards and have been blogging or publishing for more than a year, go ahead and ask them for their stories. They can tell you their own experiences with a particular webhosting service. They will be as valuable to you as you make the final decision of where to host your own blog or website. Knowing who to avoid is almost as good as knowing where to go.
The accidental geek redux
I’ve lost track on how many times I’ve tried to make something out of our Top Level Domain kusangpalo.com. Once it had been a Joomla site offering services for something that Sam and I do as a homegrown business. We offered services for domain name registration and web design and hosting, including creating presentations burnt on mini-cd’s which can be given away as promotional products. Then it became a Joomla tips site and then it became just a jump-off point for either Sam’s or my blog.
I don’t remember if it ever got PR in its previous incarnations, and I wasn’t that keen on it then. But now I figured since it was there I might as well put it to good use.
There’s stuff I do at work that I can’t talk about because of NDA’s and such, but I’ve always felt that life as an IT worker leans more on the interesting side. That’s what I plan to accomplish with Do I.T. Yourself, show the perky side of I.T. life from the point of view of an accidental geek.
Best Web Hosting Company
Sometime in 2007 I used a template for my WordPress.com blog from Kaushal Sheth. To me his name is one of the more familiar ones when it came to WordPress themes and blogging. Now when I visited his blog I saw his entry on web hosting, and how he had been in the market for a new host.
I remember the time when I made the move from my very first webhost to a new one. I was a domain registration hosting newbie and was not at all familiar with the ins and outs of registering a domain and buying hosting, so I left it all in the hands of my chosen webhost. I didn’t know what a whois could do or what a Domain Name Server was for. When I did find out about whois, I tried it on our domain kusangpalo.com. I was flabbergasted to find out that my domain, which I bought and paid for, had not been registered in my name, but that of the hosting company’s owner.
Newbie that I may have been, this was something that I thought was quite underhanded. When I lodged a complaint at the webhost’s forum they replied that they had registered it in the hosting company owner’s name so they can be reminded of the domain and site’s expiration, when the time came. I thought that was a lame excuse.
I scoured the internet and found this website http://www.webhostingpal.com/top10hosts.php. It enabled me to choose which hosting service was the best one on which to move my sites. And although I chose a provider who was not on the Top Web Hosting Sites, I think I found one of the best.
I packed my internet bags and jumped, into my current webhost Bayanhosting. This was in 2005, and I’m still with them. This domain, Sam’s and my blogs, our company website, a few of my clients at the office, I have all entrusted to Bayanhosting. I like them because they are always online on Yahoo Messenger if you need to shoot a quick question. One time I bungled the site settings and everything disappeared, but Bayanhosting had me up within 4 hours.
I haven’t even bothered to look at any other webhosting service, mainly because I haven’t had the need to do so. I’m happy where I am.
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