Blogging is a key principle in many highly effective online marketing strategies. A successful blog can drive higher volumes of traffic to your website and turn those visitors into customers. However, if you haven’t ventured into the world of blogging before, you might not be too sure about the technical aspects of getting a blog up and running.
One of the main technology considerations that you will be looking at is the hosting company that you choose for your blog. A blog will need a hosting provider to provide server space and essentially enable your website/blog to be available on the internet. It provides your website with a unique address that allows people to find your website.
Choosing a host can be a very difficult process, especially if you are completely new to blogging and setting up websites. The good news is that there are lots of online resources to call upon if you should need to. What you may find to be the most difficult bit is working out what you actually require from your host.
When you first take a look at the various hosting providers’ websites you will soon see that they are filled with technical jargon, features and specifications that you may have no understanding of. At this point, many beginners might consider whether they need to employ an expert because they don’t understand everything that they are reading about the services.
However, you don’t really need to worry too much if you are just looking to set up a fairly basic, regular blog. Hosting companies have a habit of over-complicating matters when they are promoting their services.
To give you an idea of the main areas to concentrate on:
Cost –
Costs vary greatly from one type of hosting package to another. You can use free hosting services but there are many limitations associated with this. So unless you are happy with restricted usage, you may need to pay for your hosting services to get the level of service and quality you require. If you cannot afford to pay out much on hosting fees, then think about shared hosting plans. These are where you are sharing a server with several other websites and the costs are split between you all.
Performance –
According to the experts at Google, loading time has a huge impact on conversion rates, with a case study concluding that mobile pages that load 1 sec faster see up to a 27% increase in conversion rate. So the point behind this is that when you are looking for a host, you should be looking for one that will enable your website to perform with fast speeds. Take a look at comparison tables that highlight which hosts offer the fasted hosting performance.
As well as speed, you want your website to be online and available as much as possible. This is referred to as Uptime and hosts typically offer a guaranteed percentage of Uptime between 99-100%. Obviously, if you host isn’t scoring well in this area, your blog will suffer. If users go to your blog and see that it is currently offline, you certainly won’t be making any conversions.
Customer support –
The importance of customer support is often overlooked until you are too far down the line. However, the level of customer support could play a huge part in the success of your blog. If you struggle with technical elements of getting your blog set up, or uploading content, having a good customer support service will be your biggest priority.
Imagine if your website suddenly crashes and you don’t know what has happened. You try to contact your host but their support team operates over different working hours. Or you are left standing in a telephone queue for an hour, desperately needing to speak to someone. So it pays off to carefully select your host and look at how people rate their customer support.
Disk space/Bandwidth–
Different hosts offer different limits of disk space and bandwidth. So if you are likely to have large volumes of traffic and/or content that uses up a lot of space, you need to make sure your host provides enough to support your needs.
Author Bio:
Jann is a Content Writer at ukwebhostreview.com – She is committed to providing all you need to know about technology along with researching and analyzing the best hosting providers.