It's important that your site stays up when you get a large influx of visitors.
When starting a new website or blog the one thing you want to get right the first time around is hosting. One of the biggest headaches I had when my sites started to take off was finding quality hosting that had good support and could keep my sites up with a growing number of visitors every day. This could have been completely avoided however I didn’t do the proper research and paid for it dearly.
I signed up with a really bad host called MindOnTheNet (I’m not even going to link to them) which I’m convinced is run by some guy out of his moms basement. My sites would be down for an hour or two almost daily and support was almost non-existent. During the downtime, one of my sites was being featured on the front page of Digg and even got picked up by Slashdot. Needless to say the host couldn’t handle that kind of traffic (he couldn’t keep my site up with no traffic at all, let alone 40,000 visitors a day.) and I lost a ton of free publicity. I then spent the next 2 months trying to find a quality host. I must have switched hosts about 4 times before I found a decent one.
I’m going to avoid talking in-depth about the technicalities of hosting but to keep things simple there are two general types of hosting. A decent shared hosting package usually costs around $10 a month but you’re on the same server as other sites, which means that you all share the servers resources and performance. Think of shared hosting as a condo, you still have you’re own place but share the building with other people. These days most shared hosting packages offer unlimited bandwidth and disk space, so it’s really about finding a service that is reliable and keeps your site up. If you’re starting a blog or corporate site for a small business this is what you want to start out with.
Shared Hosting is For..
- New WordPress Blogs
- Personal Sites
- Corporate Sites for a Small Businesses
- Niche E-Commerce Sites
Best Shared Hosting: If your looking for a good shared host I highly recommend HostGator (I use them to host many of my sites). When signing up make sure you go for the “Baby” package which allows you to host an unlimited number of sites with their service for around $8 / month.
Signup Tip: When signing up for a new HostGator account I always do a quick search and manage to find a working coupon that gives me free setup and my first month for free. This seems to work with most of the larger hosts out there, so if your going with Dreamhost or someone else it’s worth a shot.
With dedicated hosting, you get your own server. This technically gives your site better performance because you have all of the processing power and memory to yourself. The downside is that good dedicated hosting packages start at hundreds of dollars a month. That cost usually isn’t justified unless your getting tens of thousands of people to your site a day. The only people who are really going to need a dedicated server starting out are those who are developing a custom web service of some sort.
Dedicated Hosting is For..
- Popular Websites or Blogs (5,000+ visitors a day)
- Corporate Sites for a Medium or Large Businesses
- Large E-Commerce Sites
- Custom Web Services
Best Dedicated Hosting: I highly recommend Rackspace for dedicated hosting. Their service is a bit pricey but you get excellent support and they are super reliable.
Again, If you’re just starting a WordPress blog, stick with a $10 / month shared hosting plan – that’s probably all you’ll ever need. Just make sure to install the WP-Cache Plugin, which will keep your site up on shared hosting if you get a large amount of traffic in a short time period (Digg, Reddit, etc..)
If you know of any other quality hosts be sure to leave a comment below – just don’t spam me promoting you crappy host because I won’t approve your comment.
