Blog Building Experiment

To get your blog up and running on the net, you’ll need some space on the web where you can park all your content.  If you haven’t yet purchased a domain name and you’re not sure what’s involved, you should refer to the article “Purchasing a Domain Name” before reading on.  Most of the content covered within this article is applicable to other facets of online content publishing.  So for anybody looking at starting a non-blog related website or online service, this article should still come in handy.

The number of companies who offer web hosting services to consumers today is just about infinite.  This generates great market competition, ultimately benefiting the consumer.  The cost of web hosting can still vary greatly, depending on who you go with and the services you require.  Site’s that are just starting out can often get away with paying as little as $10USD a month for adequate hosting, while very large blogs can sometimes cost in excess of $100USD per month to host.  Needless to say, the amount of money spent hosting a successful blog is usually an extremely small fraction of that which can be made back through various advertising and sponsorship schemes. There are a number of variables to consider when choosing a web hosting provider that’ll help you get a package tailored to your needs.  These variables tend to fall into the following broad categories:

1. Disk Space, Bandwidth and Speed
2. Server Technologies
3. Customer Service and Knowledge Base
4. Reliability
5. Miscellaneous Additional Services

Following is a discussion of each.

1. Disk Space, Bandwidth and Speed

The amount of disk space made available to you determines how much content you can store on your site.  Text on a page takes up very little disk space and is generally not a cause for concern, even on a blog containing many long articles.  “Rich content” such as audio, video and larger high quality images on the other hand can use up large amount of disk space very quickly.  To illustrate this fact, a page on Blog Building Experiment that contains over 2,300 words takes up 24 KB of space.  A reasonable quality compressed MP3 audio file that runs for 2 minutes could easily take up 1 MB or more, or 42 times as much space as the 2,300 words of text.  A 2 minute video could easily take up ten times as much space again, or 420 times as much spaced as the 2,300 words of text.  That’s approximately the equivalent of 1 million words of text, all for a 2 minute video.  For a basic blog that is primarily text based and does not contain any audio, video or other rich content, 100MB of disk space will generally more than suffice.  If rich content is to be added, it may be worth considering a hosting plan that provides more disk space.

The amount of bandwidth you have allocated to your hosting account determines the amount of data that can be sent and received from your website.  Every time a user visits a webpage, information is downloaded from the server where the page is hosted, to the user’s computer.  This consumes bandwidth.  The amount of bandwidth used correlates to the size of the files that need to be downloaded in order to display a webpage or web content.  A user that views 200 pages containing 1KB of data each would use the same amount of bandwidth as another user that viewed a single page containing 200KB of data just the once.  As you can imagine, larger files like audio and video would not only have a tendency to take up more disk space than text, but also require significantly more bandwidth. 

A small, primarily text based blog with several hundred visitors per month may use under 100MB of bandwidth or so each month.  Some of the most popular blogs on the Internet which contain large quantities of audio and video content can use in excess of 100GB of bandwidth each month.  Often it’ll be difficult to have an accurate estimate of exactly how much bandwidth and disk space you’ll use until you have your blog up and running.  Almost all web hosting providers will provide you with the necessary tools to monitor your disk and bandwidth usage among other things.  Be wary of web hosting providers that state that you’ll receive unlimited bandwidth as a part of your hosting package.  Bandwidth is only part of the picture, the other aspect is speed.

The biggest problem with choosing a hosting provider that states “unlimited bandwidth” is that you often sacrifice speed as a result.  In reality, your bandwidth will be limited by the speed of the equipment the hosting company has your content hosted on.  All the bandwidth in the world is not unlimited.  Most web hosting packages run on “shared servers” meaning that other peoples hosting packages will also be run on the same machine at the hosting company.  This in turn means the total available bandwidth of the server is divided between multiple hosting packages.  Many of the cheaper hosting companies tend to use inferior connections and host a larger number of users’ websites on a single machine.  This will result in less bandwidth being allocated to each site, resulting in slower loading times for the site’s users.

A final note on the disk space/bandwidth/speed aspect of web hosting.  It’s often useful to look for a hosting provider that allows you to seamlessly upgrade to a bigger and better hosting package with them as your blog expands.  This way, you’re only paying for what you need at any given point in time.  When the point in time comes that your blog starts to outgrow its existing hosting package, you simply move up to a more accommodating package with your existing provider. This means you don’t have to worry about relocating your site to the servers of a completely new host which is likely to be problematic, in one way or another.

2. Server Technologies

Many of the most successful blogs found on the Internet today have actually been built using some sort of third party blogging software.  Third party blogging software allows you to concentrate your energy on writing content and not code.  All the nitty gritty code implementation details that convert the articles you write into HTML code that an internet browser is capable of displaying are handled for you by the software.  Ultimately, you may never need to write or script a single line of computer code for your blog.  If you’re not familiar with blogging software packages, you may wish to read “Choosing the Right Tools for the Blog”.

One thing to keep in mind about using third party blogging software tools is that most of them rely on using a database internally to store your information.  Utilising databases allows your blog to run very efficiently and makes applying changes to the overall layout or structure very simple for the maintainer of the blog.  However, using databases requires that the server your site is hosted on supports the required server technologies. 

There are a couple of different server technologies in existence, and you’ll need to make sure that your web host supports the one that your blogging software requires.  Perhaps the most popular server technology among blogging software packages is the combination of PHP scripting with MySQL databases.  This particular combination is popular as it is not only a high quality product, but also free, meaning web hosting providers don’t have to pay any licensing fees to use it.  When web hosts start having to pay fees to license software, the overhead is usually reflected in the price you pay for your web hosting account.  One such example of this is the ASP server technology used in conjunction with SQL Server databases.  These are both Microsoft products which require that web hosts need to pay licensing fees in order to support them.  Nonetheless, certain blogging software packages do use ASP rather than PHP.  

From the perspective of someone creating a blog, it’s generally not necessary to know all the intricate details and distinctions between these different server technologies.  The important thing is to ensure that the web hosting package you purchase supports whatever server technologies are required by the blogging software you intend on using, if any.  Almost all paid web hosting providers support at least one set of server technologies and this information is usually easy to obtain through the hosting company’s website.

3. Customer Service and Knowledge Base

In the relentless pursuit for the lowest price, this is perhaps the aspect most overlooked by people when searching for the right web hosting provider.  Before committing to a hosting package, have a look at who’ll be there to help in the event that you can’t get something working.  It’s almost inevitable that at one point or another you’ll run into a problem, and when you do, you’re going to want some help solving it.  Most good web hosts will have information on their site in regards to their customer service policies.  If you find one that doesn’t, it might be a bad sign.

A knowledge base is a term used to broadly describe all of the reference material available to help you resolve issues or find out information when you need it.  A knowledge base might consist of user forums, FAQs, formal documentation and other relevant reference material.  The broader the knowledge base, usually the better.  Just be careful, as quantity does not always equal quality.

4. Reliability

Another important aspect that often goes overlooked in the pursuit for a bargain is the reliability of a web host.  You should look for a host with a guaranteed uptime of at least 99%.  This means that you’re guaranteed that your site will be online and accessible to users at least 99% of the time.  This may sound very high, but in the world of web hosting, anything below this figure tends to be considered unreliable.  Even at 99%, that’s still the equivalent of 7.2 hours downtime each month – something you don’t want to be encountering.  Also make sure to check what the company’s policy is on redeeming any compensation in the event that they fail to meet the guaranteed uptime.  Some less scrupulous web hosts will require that you provide proof that the uptime guarantee hasn’t been met, prior to receiving any compensation.  Others may even deny your claim altogether.  The best of web hosts will compensate you for not meeting their uptime guarantees, even in the event that you hadn’t realised it.

5. Miscellaneous Additional Services

Web hosts often provide additional services to users that complement their chosen hosting package.  These might include free email accounts, preinstalled scripts to perform common tasks or email virus filtering software to name just a few.  Whether or not any of these additional services are required will depend on the specific circumstances, but it’s something to consider.

Once you’re done purchasing hosting space, you’ll want to move on to  Getting Your Domain Name to Point to Your Website or Blog.

A note about this site’s hosting

After reviewing a number of potential web hosts, I ended up settling on FutureQuest.  It met all the relevant criteria and yet still turned out to be very affordable.  As this site is just getting started, I’ve chosen a basic package that gives me more than enough disk space and bandwidth and all of their packages support PHP and MySQL technologies.  I’ve found they’ve got excellent customer support in place as well as an elaborate knowledge base to work with. 

The other thing I really liked is that they have a guaranteed 99.5% uptime.  The best bit though, is that if they don’t meet this guarantee and there’d been no posted advisory of scheduled downtime, they’ll automatically credit my account for 24 hours of free hosting for every half hour of downtime over.  This means I don’t have to bother making any formal submission or submitting any proof of downtime, it’s just done.

FutureQuest also met my final criteria, in that I’m able to easily transition to a bigger hosting package once the site begins to outgrow the basic package.  No doubt there’s other great hosts out there, but I believe FutureQuest would certainly be one of the better hosts available, and one that I can verify so through my own experiences.

Purchasing a domain name is the first step towards getting a blog up and running on the Internet.  A domain name is simply the address a user types into their Internet browser’s address bar when they wish to visit your page on the Internet.  A domain name is one example of a “URL”, which may be more familiar terminology.  Examples of familiar domain names include http://www.blogbuildingexperiment.com and http://www.google.com.  Domain names can also end in “.net”, “.org” and “.us” to name just a few, although “.com” is considered the most popular.

Once you’ve decided on a domain name, the easiest way to register it is usually online through a “domain name registrar”.  A domain name registrar is simply a company who has the proper authorisation to register Internet domain names on the behalf of customers.  The cost associated with registering a domain name can range from around $7.00USD per year up to around $30.00USD per year, depending on who you go through.  This site’s domain name; http://www.blogbuildingexperiment.com was registered through MyDOMAIN for $8.95 USD.  Other popular domain registrars include Go Daddy and Moniker.  You can check the availability of any domain name online for free through a domain name registrar to see whether or not a specific name has already been taken. 

It’s generally not advisable to purchase a domain name through the very cheapest domain name registrar you can find.  The simple reason for this is that you’re more likely to run into problems with getting a poor set of domain configuration tools and subpar support by going with a rock-bottom priced registrar.  Also, if you decide to change your mind later on and transfer your domain name to another registrar, you’ll likely run into more issues with the transfer if the domain was initially registered on the cheap.   I’ve had no problems thus far using MyDOMAIN as my registrar, although I’ve also heard good things about Go Daddy and Moniker among others.  While it’s important not to penny pinch too much when purchasing a domain name, I’m yet to see much benefit in spending $20.00USD or more on registering a domain name.

It’s often considered good practice to choose a domain name that matches the name of your website.  This way users will have an easier time identifying your domain name as being associated with the name of your site and will make your site more recognisable to users in search engine results.  Some good guidelines for choosing the right domain name can be found here.  This blog’s domain name breaks some of these guidelines like the small length rule, in favour of having a more descriptive name.

Once you’ve purchased a domain name, you’ll probably find there’s a few options to configure.  For the time being, most of these can be left at their defaults until you’ve performed the next step in getting your blog online - Purchasing Web Hosting.

This article discusses the types of tools available to users to aid in building and maintaining a blog. 

When initially starting a blog, you must decide whether you would like to build a blog the “old fashion way”, or whether you’d like to use third party blog building software. The old fashion way involves manually coding webpages or designing them using a visual website building application such as Adobe Dreamweaver. You’ll also likely want to be running some sort of server-side scripts on your blog at some point, which will once again, involve more manual coding. This method is very labour intensive and requires that you are proficient in writing HTML code, as well as server-side scripts if you plan for your blog to be more than very basic. 

Building a blog the old fashion way is generally reserved only for a programming purist and even the majority of them wouldn’t bother. If you’re starting a blog purely to learn HTML or a new scripting language however, then this might be the way to go. If you’re starting a blog for the reason most do; in order to get your content published on the net and you want things up and running quickly, then the old fashion way is definitely not for you.

The alternative to the old fashion way is to use some sort of blog building software or tools to create your blog, which is what this article is centred around. These tools let you concentrate your energy on writing content rather than code and allow you to produce a high quality blog in a minute fraction of the time it would take to code an entire blog by hand.
Blogging software and tools can be broken down into two discrete categories:

1. Blogs hosted by the provider of the blogging software
2. Blogs hosted independently of the software provider

When a blog is hosted by the provider of the blogging software, all of your blog content is held on servers owned by the company who provides the blogging tools. This is a more service oriented blogging tool, in that you’re not only getting the software to write your blog, but you’re also being provided the service of having your blog hosted. One prime example of this is Blogger, a blogging tool owned by Google. When you create a blog using Blogger, Google takes all your content and hosts it on their servers for you. When people go to view your blog, the content is being downloaded from the Google servers where it is parked. This is perhaps the easiest way to start a blog and it tends to require the least amount of effort. The other benefit of using tools like this is that you don’t have to pay to host your blog; it tends to be done for you free of charge.

The alternative software method, which has already been mentioned, is using blogging software that requires you to host your blog independently. This basically means you’re given the tools to create your blog, but it’s up to you to find hosting so you can get your blog onto the Internet. To get your blog up and running on the Internet requires that you purchase your own domain name and web hosting space.  For more information regarding this, have a look at the articles “Purchasing a Domain Name” and ”Purchasing Web Hosting“.

Self-hosted blogging software generally comes bundled as a series of files which you have to first download from the software provider’s website. Once the files have been downloaded, you’ll usually need to make a few minor configuration changes to some of the files using a basic text editor like notepad. Once these changes have been made, the files need to be uploaded to the server of the company you’ve purchased hosting with. Once the files have been uploaded, you’ll most likely have to go through a short series of steps to configure your blog further, after which you can commence blogging using the publishing tools provided by the software package you have chosen. Detailed installation instructions can usually be found on any piece of blogging software’s respective website. 

There are a number of high quality free blogging tools available on the net, one of the most notable being WordPress (which this blog has been made using). I was surprised to find that a large number of the most successful blogs on the internet are actually made using WordPress or other free blogging tools. While many of the blogging software tools available are free to download, as mentioned earlier, there is of course the cost associated with purchasing a domain name and web hosting space. The benefit of having your blog hosted with your own paid web hosting provider of choice is that you inherently get allot more freedom and flexibility. This means you’ll have more ways to not only customize but monetize your blog, with the freedom to use whatever advertising or other monetization methods you see fit. It’ll also mean you’re no longer at the mercy of your free blog host, should they decide to change the terms and conditions or go tinkering with their technology. For anybody serious about blogging, using paid hosting in combination with some sort of downloadable blogging software is generally considered the only sane option.

It is sometimes possible to find web hosting providers who offer free space on the Internet. It might seem that this way you can get the best of both worlds by not having to pay a cent and still getting all the customisation and monetization opportunities you’d hoped for. The biggest problem with these free web hosts is that there are usually all sorts of strings attached to the so-called “free” space. With a free webhost, you’re much more likely to get poor reliability, service and performance and you’ll almost certainly have your site’s pages laced with unsolicited advertisements, among other things.

In summary, if you’re trying to get a blog off the ground quickly and you’re not prepared to sacrifice on quality or flexibility, blogging software such as WordPress combined with paid web hosting is likely to be the best candidate. If you’re not willing to spend a dime and you’re happy to sacrifice a little on flexibility and monetization opportunities, a service like Blogger will get you up and running quickly. If you’re a hard-core code enthusiast, you might consider the option of building the whole thing from scratch. Just keep in mind that a similar or better blog can likely be produced using free blogging software in a tiny fraction of the time and with significantly less effort being expended. With the number of options and plug-ins available for free blogging software such as WordPress, you’re generally not too limited in what you can do in terms of customisation either. Coding a good blog from scratch is certainly not an overnight task.

Hello and welcome to the new site blogbuildingexperiment.com.  Blog Building Experiment is a site targeted at researching and refining exactly what it takes to build a successful blog property on the web.  The site will focus primarily on blogs, however, it is expected that many of the topic principles discussed within will render themselves applicable across other facets of web publishing.

Looking into the foreseeable future, it is anticipated that this site will become host to a valuable repository of articles based around not only how to get a blog off the ground, but also ensuring it maintains steady growth.  These articles will dismantle and discussing a broad array of topics, both technical and non-technical in nature.  Whether it be setting up a domain or simply not upsetting your users, if it’s relevant, it’ll make its way here, so stay tuned.  The site will also investigate what it takes to effectively monetize a blog so that you can get something back for all that you put in.

Before going any further, let’s define what constitutes a “successful blog” in the context of the Blog Building Experiment website.  In the context of this site, “successful” refers to a blog that possesses the following qualities:

1. Provides content that site visitors consider valuable
2. Draws a consistently high number of visitors
3. Rewards the owner for their work, financially or otherwise

Once a blog meets all three of the conditions outlined above, then by the Blog Building Experiment definition, it has become successful.  The definition of a successful blog will vary between individuals, but this is the Blog Building Experiment definition and is the archetype around which this site’s content is to be based.

You might be asking where the term “experiment” fits into the whole equation.  The answer would be “left, right, front and centre”.  At the time of this statement’s writing, few of the topics and titles of the articles scheduled to be published are known.  Why?  Because the research is yet to be done.  This site is not being launched, built or backed by a professional blogger or web publisher who’s “done it all before”.  This site is an experiment aimed at determining what’s involved in building a successful blog by actually starting one and reporting back on progress as the blog evolves.

Many people, at some point in their lifetime, have or will learn how to ride a bike.  It’s a skill that once learned becomes innate and can be performed on a subconscious level.  But how many people that know how to ride a bike, could accurately describe what’s involved in learning to ride a bike?  It is a strange phenomenon that applies to many scenarios in life, where an individual is quite capable of doing something; they just don’t know how they do it.  Using this idea, Blog Building Experiment aims to capture the crucial information before it manifests into a fully acquired skill that is difficult to describe.  Building this blog under an experimental model allows the process to be chronicled in a series of articles as new information about the process is obtained.  Essentially, it is hoped that the experimental nature of this blog will allow any knowledge acquired to be conveyed more effectively to the target audience.

If it so happens that this blog fails in its endeavours to become successful, nothing has been lost.  There will be nothing lost in establishing that an idea doesn’t work.  As Thomas Edison once described, he didn’t fail 1000 times at inventing the light bulb, he discovered 1000 ways that did not work, and there was no need to try them again.  After all, this blog is an experiment and experiments are all about trying something new and seeing what will happen.  The hypothesis is that providing quality articles describing the process of starting, building, growing and maintaining a successful blog, will in turn provide an opportunity for a successful blog in itself to manifest.  The Results… We shall wait and see.