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Archive for the ‘Hosting’ Category

What is the best web hosting company for WordPress blogs?

If you have your own WordPress blog on your own domain you’ll need somewhere to host your files. And when you start looking round you’ll find that not all web hosts are created equal.

So what do you look for? Here’s my checklist:

• Must be reliable
• Must have cPanel with Fantastico and Simple Scripts
• Must provide superb technical support
• Must offer unlimited addon domains
• Must be reasonably priced

Why Fantastico and Simple Scripts? Because these two tools enable automatic creation of new WordPress blogs – no more manual uploading of all the WordPress files! And Simple Scripts not only lets you create a new WordPress blog with a few clicks of the mouse, you can now automatically upgrade WordPress when a new version is released. How cool is that?

I use Bluehost for my blogs. That’s where this blog is hosted and I now wouldn’t use any other service.

On a few occasions I’ve needed some technical support, particularly when I was new to blogging and wanted to do something beyond my ability(:-(), and I found their support staff helpful, smart and unfailingly patient.

It might be tempting to go to a small, cheap hosting service but you won’t get the reliability and quality of service that a larger company can provide. Trust me, I’ve learned that the hard way!

Click here to find out more about Bluehost WordPress hosting

What’s the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org?

WordPress.com is a free blog platform, hosted by WordPress. You can have a totally free blog as a subdomain on their server. Your blog’s URL would be xxxxxx.wordpress.com where xxxxxx is your chosen username. The advantage is that it’s free and you have a wide choice of themes (designs) and blogging tools that you can choose from. The disadvantage is that you can’t monetize it: they don’t allow you to put Adsense on it and they can close you down if you have money-making or business links on your blog. And another downside is that you don’t own the blog – they do. They can remove your blog at will if you do something that is against their terms of service.

WordPress.org is the self-hosted version of WordPress. The software driving the blog is free but you have to pay for a domain and hosting service. This doesn’t cost megabucks and is essential if you are running any sort of business. The advantage of this is that the blog URL is your own domain that you registered. And you can pretty much do what you like on your blog: have Adsense, sell your own product(s), have affiliate links, plugins, banners, whatever you like. You own the blog – it’s your property and you could even sell it.