PluginID’s The Blogging Blueprint- A Practical Application Guide. Part 2: Setting up a Hosting Service

18th January, 2010 at 16:02 | Posted in Blogging, Technology | Comments Off
Tags: Creating a Blog Business, Ebook Benefits, PluginID

Thanks to PluginID’s The Blogging Blueprint I’m on my way to blogging success. In  part one I learned how to get a domain name that I’ll put to use once I’ve set up my hosting service.

Hosting

Now that you have a domain, you need to find yourself a hosting company. If you think of your domain as a name for your site then you can think of a host as the home for that domain. A web hosting company gives you space on their servers for a monthly fee, and in return you can upload anything and as much as you want (within their limits). Basically, you can host your forum, eCommerce store, directory, or in this case, blog.

Glen has recommended Hostgator and wasn’t the first to do so. I’ve seen this company’s name pop up more than a few times in the various Google Reader subscriptions that I have to blogging or web development websites.

What Glen says of them:

The company I use for hosting my website is Hostgator. They have over 1 million clients, are very trustworthy and their cheapest hosting option comes in at a measly $5 per month. Hostgator are definitely not the only great host out there, but I use them, so that is why I am recommending them. They offer excellent support which you can see for yourself by going to their site and clicking on ‘live support’ in the top right hand corner of the page. They always have staff available and you can ask them any questions about their service.

Based on Glen’s advice, and the recommendations on other sites I’ve chosen to go with Hostgator too. It has occurred to me that this is the second time I’ve blindly used something Glen has recommended and not researched more information on. This is not something I would ordinarily do because I’m a firm believer in having all the options presented for educated decision making.

The reason that I trust what Glen recommends comes specifically from the ethical way he runs his business and has been doing so for a number of years. This is a game he’s won time and time again, and he’s using these products too, which gives me a greater confidence that he’s already done the research and this is the best and cheapest he’s found.

Hosting Options

There are multiple packages available to choose from when you use Hostgator, they are:

• Hatchling – $4.95/m – only one domain allowed
• Baby – $7.95/m – unlimited domains allowed
• Business – $12.95/m – unlimited domains, dedicated IP and private SSL

I personally don’t think the benefits of business are worth the extra 5 dollars per month. I use the Baby option because I host 10 of my own sites and sites for my friends with the company. If you only plan on running one website, your blog, then the hatchling offer is fine.

I’m going with the Baby plan over three years because I want to host a few domains, especially my mothers that I’m using as the Online Business Developer experiment site in the future.

Glen has done a lot of work in his ebook outlining how to set up the hosting and I see no reason to repeat this. Glen recommends using a particular word for the coupon but what I found was that Hostgator gave me a congratulatory coupon word, probably because I purchased three years right off the bat.

As an experiment I decided to see what both gave me:

• Glen’s Recommended Word: $9.94 discount
• Hostgator’s Congratulatory Word: $57.24 discount

Spot the winner by a landslide. Nice!

Linking NameCheap to Hostgator

Again, Glen’s done a bonza job of making this super simple. It’s a case of taking the information that Hostgator emails you and putting it into Namecheap as Glen illustrates. Too easy.

The next stage is to incorporate the WordPress blogging platform into Hostgator, which I’ll do in the next post. See you then!

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Side note: In part1 I didn’t know what a Cpanel was. I’ve since learned it is short for Control Panel, that is, what you use to maintain your website.

Missed the Beginning?

• Part 1: Getting the Blog Ball Rolling