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.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.