After reading everything you need to know about web hosting, be sure to check out the four web hosting providers we recommend.

This guide will evolve. Some subjects just require too many details, and are therefore better suited as individual posts – which will be linked to from here after we get around to writing about them.

8 Web Hosting Facts

1. Why pay full price? There are almost always web hosting coupons available. You should be able to find them easily with a quick Google search. If you’re looking for a virtual private server, or a dedicated server, it’s a good idea to check out the deals announced on popular web hosting forums.

2. Most web hosting reviews and recommendations are bogus. They’re simply trying to make an affiliate sale. Some might even feel obligated to hype up their own web hosting provider . A lot of sites are sponsored, and receive free web hosting. Make sure you’re reading real reviews from real people. My favorite happens to be HostJury.

3. The term “unlimited” is deceiving. Many shared hosting packages offer unlimited bandwidth. The truth is, you’re never going to see that bandwidth, because providers place caps on the amount of server resources your site can use at any given time.

4. Shared hosting is just that… shared. You have to remember that your site is on a server with many other sites that belong to other people. Therefore, if your site is using up too many resources, you’re going to slow down every other site on that server. Web hosting providers need to protect every client on that server. Host Gator for example, allows you to use up to 25% of server resources for 90 seconds. If you go over this cap, your account will be frozen until you’re able to work things out.

5. Don’t assume that a VPS is better than shared hosting. Just because a VPS costs more, doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to see better performance. Again, lets use Host Gator as an example. Their shared packages start at only $4.95 a month. Looking at the server specs on their shared servers, and taking into account what I’ve mentioned above (25% cap), you’ll be able to calculate that you’re allowed to use the following resources (in bursts):

• 2.0 GHz CPU
• 2 GB of ram

Now lets say you’re in the market for a VPS, because your site has received a ton of traffic lately. Maybe you just got featured on the front page of Digg, and got the boot from your shared server. Obviously, you’re going to want at least the same amount of resources you had on the shared server (2.0 GHz CPU, 2 GB of ram). A fully managed VPS with those specs will run you around $100 a month. So, if you were to move from your $5 shared server, to a $30 VPS, you’re actually downgrading in many ways.

As you can see, the shared server was allowing your site to expand with bursts of traffic when needed, but once you’re forced to move to your own server, you have to purchase ALL of those resources, regardless of whether or not your site is using them at all times.

6. Don’t assume a dedicated server is better than a VPS. There are plenty of VPS servers that can out-perform lower-end dedicated servers, even though the dedicated might actually cost a lot more. One of the biggest disadvantages of a VPS however, is disk i/o, since it can’t be isolated.

7. All hard drives are not created equal. Typically, SSD > SAS > SCSI > SATA. You’ll also want to check the raid setup.

8. Your database or media files can be served from another location. Amazon for example, offers a variety of CDN and cloud services, and there are even wordpress plugins to help with integration. Depending on your needs, this could be a cost-effective solution.

11 Questions To Ask The Web Hosting Provider

1. Are the servers fully managed?

2. Is there a network uptime guarantee?

3. Is there a hardware replacement SLA (question doesn’t apply to shared hosting)?

4. Is there an initial response guarantee (for support)?

5. What type of access do I have to support? Phone? Email? Live chat online? Available 24/7?

6. How scalable is the server? Easy to upgrade? Do files need to be transferred or is an upgrade automatic? Will my site experience any downtime?

7. Is there a setup fee? Are there any discounts available for paying an initial setup fee?

8. Is there a contract?

9. Is there a money back guarantee?

10. What control panel and/or features does the server have?

11. Does the data center (where my server resides) have the following safety precautions: Fire suppression systems in place? Authorized access in a secure area? Temperature controlled environment? Back-up power supply?

Note: Many of the answers to these questions can be found on the sales page itself.

8 Server Specs To Look For Before Making A Decision On A VPS Or Dedicated Server

1. Processor: Check out this article on server load.

2. Memory

3. Hard drive

4. Operating system: Plan on using Windows or Linux?

5. Control panel

6. Bandwidth

7. Port speed

8. Dedicated IP addresses available

Web Hosting (Everything You Need To Know) is a post from: i7o Media

Liquid Web

The Good: Superior reliability, excellent support, and options…many options! They offer shared hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated servers.

Want to add 1GB of ram without upgrading to the next (tier) package? Maybe you want to upgrade the processor, or add a gigabit uplink port? No problem. Liquid Web offers the best scalability.

The VPS, dedicated servers, and upgrades are competitively priced.

The Bad: Their shared hosting packages are expensive and don’t offer as much as you’d expect at those price points.

The Ugly: Hell, we can’t think of anything. Liquid Web has a solid reputation.

Host Gator

The Good: Host Gator is by far the absolute best in the shared hosting industry. Fully managed servers, fast, reliable, great prices, and the best support we’ve seen. Call, or use the online live-chat feature and get a response within a few minutes.

Host Gator is very fair, and unlike other shared hosting providers, will not bother you over minor issues such as wordpress plugins that command too many queries.

The Bad: Although we’re a fan of their shared hosting, they don’t offer any virtual private servers. They do have dedicated servers available, but the options and scalability are severely limited.

The Ugly: Again, they are the best as far as shared hosting goes, but that doesn’t mean shared hosting doesn’t come with its trade-offs.

Since you’re sharing a server with others, if you go over the resource limit, you’re going to effect everyone on that server. Therefore, they reserve the right to take your site offline and even ban you if you’re causing other sites to slow down.

Host Gator is pretty lenient; allowing you to use up to 25% of server resources for 90 second bursts. Some claim to have had sites with near 100,000 uniques per month running on a Host Gator shared package.

However, large traffic spikes are what you need to worry about. If you’re constantly hitting the front page of Digg, you’re going to want more than shared hosting.

Media Temple

The Good: Awesome control panel, and the ability to do just about everything through the iphone enabled panel. Media Temple offers something that no other provider can at the moment. The ability to handle traffic spikes from sites like Digg, for only $20 a month on their grid service.

The Bad: Going from their $150 a month DV server, the next tier available is the Nitro package, at $750 a month. That’s quite a big jump. Sure they offer ala carte upgrades in between those two packages, but you’ll pay way more than you should for them.

The Ugly: Their grid service experienced a very significant amount of downtime earlier this tear. Many sites were down, and email unavailable for hours (some report days). Everything seems to be under control now, after they upgraded the system.

Known Host

The Good: Great prices, very reliable, good customer support, and sky-high approval ratings. They offer many packages including hybrid servers, which are a lot cheaper, and even outperform some dedicated servers. Click a button and upgrade your packages instantly.

The Bad: Some upgrade options are limited, but not a big deal for 99.9% of webmasters.

The Ugly: We say “good” support and not “great” because they don’t offer a phone number on their website. All support is handled via email.

Best Web Hosting (Our Recommendations) is a post from: i7o Media

Gravity Forms: Makes form management easier than ever. Especially useful for sites that publish user-generated content.

Duplicate Post Checker: Will check for similar posts that already exist. Great for sites that publish jokes, quotes, poems, etc.

Viper’s Video Quicktags: If you embed videos into your posts, you’ll definitely want this plugin. Once the plugin is installed, you can configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, alignment, etc.). Then all you need to do is paste the url (that the video is located at), and it will show up in your post.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Uses an advanced algorithm to show related articles (from your blog) for each post. The plugin also caches the related posts that are shown, which significantly improves performance over other related posts plugins.

WP-Polls: Allows you to place a poll on your site. Easily customized via templates and css styles.

Feedburner Feedsmith: Detects all the ways to access your feed, and redirects them to your Feedburner feed (allowing you to track all of your subscribers).

WPtouch iPhone Theme: Transforms your blog into an iPhone application-style theme when viewed from popular smartphones (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre, etc.).

Monetizing

OiOPublisher: Allows you to sell your own advertising through a fully automated system. Also makes it easy to sell digital products.

Amazon Auto Affiliate Linker: Automatically adds your Amazon affiliate id to every link pointing to Amazon from your blog.

Performance

WP Super Cache: This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic blog; dramatically reducing server load during high traffic spikes.

Security

WP Security Scan: Scans your Wordpress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.

Limit Login Attempts: Limits the number of login attempts from an IP address, making a brute-force attack difficult. The plugin will also log the activity, and notify you via email if you choose.

Akismet: Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to prevent spam from getting published. Also allows you to review the spam it catches.

RSS Footer: Makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feed. This is great for adding a link back to your site (to counter scraper sites that are stealing your content).

SEO

All-in-One SEO Pack: A must have plugin for SEO. Here are just a few actions that are easily performed using this plugin:

• Setup canonical urls
• Rewrite titles
• Set meta description and keywords
• Optimize title format
• Enable noindex on specific pages, to avoid duplicate content penalties

SEO Friendly Images: Automatically updates images with ALT and TITLE attributes.

SEO Smart Links: Allows you to interlink posts on your site, or link to affiliate sites through keywords that you specify. When these words appear in your posts, they will automatically link to the url you set.

Google XML Sitemaps: Generates a XML-Sitemap of your site. Supported by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask – this will help search engines crawl your site.

More Useful WordPress Plugins

Come on, you didn’t expect us to stop there did you? That would only leave you wanting more. Which is exactly why we’ve added 10 more plugins to the list.

Why didn’t these make the top list? To maintain performance, we believe you should aim to keep plugins to a minimum. Additional plugins mean longer load times, stress on the server, the possibility of complicated upgrades, and maybe even trouble with your web host (depending on the provider).

We also took into consideration how useful the plugins are, and how easy they would be to replace by simple theme revisions, or manual actions. In other words, if the plugins only added a minor convenience, we preferred to avoid the unnecessary bloat.

Even so, many bloggers will find these plugins useful, so we’ve added them to cater to everyone.

WP-DBManager: Allows you to optimize, repair, and backup your database.

Why it didn’t make the top list: We prefer doing a manual backup of the entire site (not just the database).

W3 Total Cache: The ultimate plugin to improve server performance; this plugin has it all. Seriously the author thought of everything.

Why it didn’t make the top list: Unless you’re advanced in dealing with the backend of your site, you won’t be able to take advantage of many of the features offered in this plugin. You’d be better off using the WP Super Cache plugin mentioned above.

Robots Meta: Easily add meta robot tags to Wordpress pages.

Why it didn’t make the top list: All-in-One SEO Pack already gives you the ability to noindex the important stuff. This plugin just goes overboard in our opinion.

Breadcrumb NavXT: Generates locational breadcrumb trails for your blog.

Why it didn’t make the top list: Breadcrumb navigation is situational. In fact, some studies show that breadcrumb navigation can actually confuse the user. Even so, breadcrumb nvaigation is easy enough to implement without a plugin if needed.

SEO Slugs: Removes common words (the, in, a, what, you, can) from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

Why it didn’t make the top list: We’re not convinced that this is going to make a big difference in your rankings.

We’ll be adding more plugins to the list soon. Be sure to bookmark this page!

18+ (Must Have) WordPress Plugins is a post from: i7o Media

We saved the best for last! When it comes to making serious money from your blog – affiliate programs are your cash cow.

Affiliate Marketing In A Nutshell
Affiliate marketing is connecting customers to merchants and taking a commission. A website owner will promote a product on their website and each time a visitor clicks the link to the merchant’s site and buys, the website owner gets a commission.

How do we find products/services to promote?
The best way to find affiliate programs is through affiliate networks such as Commission Junction and Clickbank. You sign up for an account, search the database of products/services, once you find the product you want to promote, you simply add the links or banner to your website.

How is it tracked back to the website owner?
When you sign up for the affiliate program, you will be given a special link which contains your affiliate ID, so it can be tracked back to you.

Types of Affiliate Incomes
Recursive – You may be promoting a monthly service to your customers such as website hosting. Often you will receive a monthly commission for as long as that customer is paying for the service.

For example – You may refer a customer to a hosting company and the customer signs up for a $20/month hosting plan. Each month you receive a $5 commission. Sure $5 is not much money, but imagine if you sign up 100 people during the year. Now you have $500 recursive passive income. You literally do nothing to earn this money, it just keeps coming in!

CPA(cost per action) – With CPA offers, you will get payed only once for refering customers. You can be paid if your customers buy a product, take a free trial, in some cases they only need to enter their email address into a form and you get paid.

I promote a membership product on one of my blogs, each time a customer takes a 7 day trial membership for $1.95, I get paid $30. Not a bad deal at all! The membership site converts enough “trial members” to “full members” that they can afford to pay $30 CPA.

It is always a good idea to know the product well before you start recommending it to your visitors. It needs to be relevant to your blog niche and genuinely useful to your visitors. Don’t promote crap or you will lose visitors.

Right now, I am not promoting affiliate offers on Bizboink. I am focused on building up quality content and a loyal following. If I were to start promoting products, I would promote products such as:

• Hostgator – A website hosting company. They have an affiliate program, it is recursive. I use hostgator myself and they are a fantastic service, so I would have no problem promoting them.

• Wordpress Themes – There are some awesome wordpress templates packages which I could promote. I have bought many of them, so I know which to promote.

• SEO software – I could promote keyword research tools such as Micro Niche Finder. I use this software everyday and it has helped make me alot of money. I would provide video tutorials on how it works and how to get the most from it.

That should give you some ideas on how to promote affiliate programs.

Always Remember
As a blogger you are not here to solely promote products – you’re primary focus is your readers. Focus on providing value and entertainment, if you can do that, you build readers trust and loyalty and when you occasionally promote a product – you will have your readers respect and attention.

Monetize Your Blog(Part 3) – Affiliate Programs is a post from: i7o Media

Another option to make money from your blog is to do paid reviews. Basically you get paid to review a company, service or product on your blog.

Here’s how it works

1. Sign Up With reviewme.com
Reviewme.com is a company similar to text-link-ads which we spoke about in Part 1. Once you have joined reviewme, you will be listed on their website. Companies, individuals, webmaster and product owners who are looking for some advertising for their service or product will pay anywhere between $40 and $500 for a review on your website. The cost depends mainly on the exposure your blog will give them. Reviewme will decide the cost.

2. Write and Publish Your Review
Once an order is placed by an advertiser, you will receive notification and given 48 hours to publish a review. Once you publish the review, it will be checked by reviewme and you will be paid at the end of the month.

The best thing about paid reviews is that you can be 100% honest. This is a review…..NOT a plug! There is a huge difference. The advertiser has come to you, so you can be as honest as you like. Remember to always think of your readers first and foremost! If the product or service is crappy, then tell your readers that. If the product is actually pretty good, then go ahead and recommend it to your readers. If the product is good, but has a few issues – tell them that. You get the idea.

Always remember – your reputation and integrity is of upmost importance, you need to build trust in your readers. You can choose which paid reviews you want to accept. If you really don’t want to put your readers through the agony of a crappy product review, then reject the offer.

Here is the annoying part – reviewme.com takes 50% of the payment. Whilst they have generated the advertisers for you, it is a hefty chunk of the profits. Here is what I would do….

3. Also add a Paid Review offer on your “Advertise With Us” Page.
We spoke about the importance of having an advertise with us page in Part 1. If you can generate paid reviews directly, you can make more money and you can charge the advertisers less. make it 75% of what you are worth on reviewme.com

Add this to your “Advertise With Us” page:

Package 3 – Sponsored Review
Cost:
What you receive:
Conditions:
Benefits:

If you are getting decent traffic to your blog, you will no doubt attract paid reviews.

Monetize Your Blog(Part 2) – Paid Reviews is a post from: i7o Media

Paid advertising can be a great way to make easy monthly income on your blog. Many of the top bloggers make good money through paid advertising.

Here are the options:

1. Text Link Ads
You can join a company such as text-link-ads.com who will manage your paid advertising. Firstly you will need to create a “publisher” account. TLA will then decide the price of the ads on your site based on factors such as traffic, theme and link popularity. You will then go into the marketplace and advertisers can find you. You will be provided with a small piece of script which you will need to place on your site. Very easy to add this to a sidebar “text-widget”

Once an advertiser chooses to place a text-link ad on your site, they will pay the money to TLA management and the link will go automatically into the pre-defined link section on your site(usually in the sidebar). You split the revenue 50/50 with TLA and get paid on the 1st of every month.

2. Private Text Link Ads
This is the same method as above, however you cut out the middle man and keep all the revenue yourself. You will need to set up an “advertise with us” page on your site. On that page you will need to provide advertisers with details of your advertising packages.
- Cost per month
- What you actually get
- Availability
- Benefits

By cutting out the middle man(TLA), you will increase your profits on each advertising space, however you will need to track-down payments, manage the links and keep it all up-to-date. It can certainly be a pain in the butt, especially chasing up advertisers for monthly payments.

I would recommend you do both of the above. Most definitely join a network such as TLA as this will increase your exposure to advertisers. Also add the “advertise with us” page so you can get 100% payment and capture some advertisers who are actually visiting your site.

Another option is to check out related blogs in your niche. See who is advertising on those blogs, contact them and see if they are interested. Look at who is advertising on the best blogs in your niche – these will be the interested folks who have money for advertising.

Here’s what I would do - I would advertise at TLA and use this service for a few months. I would then contact the advertisers privately and see if they would like to pay 75% of what they are paying now through TLA. I’m sure they will agree. That way you make 75% instead of 50% and the advertisers pay 75% instead of 100%. Are you following? Advertisers save money and you make more money. 50% commission from TLA is ridiculous.

3. Banner Ads
You could offer a premium package on your “Advertise with us” page which has a banner advertisement in the sidebar, footer or the end of each post. You can charge more for these banners.

Some blog themes come with custom advertising space in the sidebar. If you have no advertisers, make a small banner “Advertise your company here” and add it to that space.

Most of all, I highly recommend you add an “advertise with us” page. If your blog has plenty of traffic, you should be making some easy bucks with paid advertising.

If you have low traffic to your blog, you will need to build it up before you will be able to attract adertisers. Nonetheless, you should still add your “advertise with us” so its ready to go.

Remember - great content = more visitors = more $$ from advertising. It all comes back to great content. Content is King!!

Monetize Your Blog(Part 1) – Paid Advertising is a post from: i7o Media

1. Featured Content Gallery
This plugins allows you to create a fully automated content gallery. The gallery can be placed anywhere in your blog and is fully customizable. Looks awesome on the front page of your blog, giving your blog a modern interactive feel!

2. ShareThis
A social bookmarking plugin which allows your visitors to easily bookmark or email a post/page. Fully customizable with the ability to choose which sites appear in options, exclude from certain pages or put it in the side bar.

3. Smart YouTube
Easily insert youtube videos into your posts or sidebar widget. Smart youtube is awesome because it supports high quality video, works on the iphone and allows videos to be viewed in fullscreen. Highly customizable, low on external resources and very easy to use.

4. Twitter Tools
If your not twittering, you should be! Twitter tools connects your wordpress blog to twitter. This plugin will automatically update your twitter with your new blog post title bringing twitter traffic and often retweets which can go viral!! Makes twitter life easy!

5. Disqus
Disqus is a blog comment management system. You have the ability to show unique avatars for each commenter, comments can be sorted easily, you can also reply directly to certain comments. It looks great, easy to install and it makes it a breeze to regulate your comments. It connects directly to facebook out of the box and you can use it in the sidebar widgets to reward top commentators.

6. Popularity Contest
Displays your most popular posts based on certain criteria such as views, comments, pingbacks. You can adjust the weighting of each factor to customize your own popularity.

7. FlickrRSS
A popular plugin, lets you display your flickr photos easily on your blog. You can add this to the sidebar via the widget.

8. DropCap First Character Wordpress Plugin
This plugin makes the first character of each post big(magazine style). Depending on what type of blog you have, this can look very pimp!

9. Subscribe Remind
This plugin will remind your visitors at the bottom of each post to subscribe to your RSS feed. It’s not that cool, but reconnecting with your audience over and over again via RSS – now that is the goal!

10. Digg Digg
Plugin that adds digg, twitter, yahoo buzz and reddit butttons with counters so that your readers can vote directly on your page. Pretty cool way to get some viral content going.

11. WP Greet Box
Create custom welcome messages for your visitors depending on which URL they arrived from. For example, if your visitors arrived from digg, you can remind them to vote for your post. Fully customizable.

12. WP Since Last Visit
This plugin will show previous visitors a small “New” flag when they return to your blog and there is new material that they have not read yet. Test this one out first as it’s not compatible with all themes.

13. WP-PostRatings
Give your visitors the opportunity to rate your posts. You can then display the most popular posts in a sidebar widget. Be careful using in-tandem popularity contest as they do a similar job.

14. AnyFont
Allows you to use any type of font you would like anywhere on your blog. For example, if you would like a particular style for post titles, then this would be ideal. You can use this anywhere in your blog.

15. Thickbox
A good way to add style to your pictures. If you have galleries of pictures, this plugin will pimp them up.

Listen: Upload and activate 1 plugin at a time!! Get the plugin completely working and customized before you move onto the next one. Too often I see people get excited with plugins – they download 20 of them, do a massive upload, activate, activate, activate, activate…..before they know it, their blogs are outta control with plugins.

Do one at a time, once you are satisfied it works, move to the next. Sometimes plugins cause problems with certain themes and if you upload them all at once, you will not know which plugin is the problem.

Pimp Your Blog With These 15 Wordpress Plugins is a post from: i7o Media

1. All in One SEO Pack
In my opinion, this is the most useful plugin of all time. Helps you pick the post titles, keywords, tags and more. It also allows you to noindex the category, tag and archive pages which helps you avoid duplicate content issues.

2. Google Sitemap Generator
This great little plugin creates a sitemap file each time your blog is updated. Search engines love sitemaps. The name is misleading as yahoo, msn, ask and many others will read the sitemap. Very easy to install.

3. Google Analytics
Google analytics allows you to get detailed stats on your blog. How many visitors, where they came from, which pages they visited, where they exited. Possibilities are endless with google analytics, a great free tool

4. MBP Ping Optimizer
This little plugin will control your pinging. You don’t want to be pinging the search engines every 10 secs, this allows you to control the minimum time between pings as well as a ping log.

5. Automatic SEO Links
Allows you to choose a keyword/keyphrase and turn that into a link each time it is mentioned in the blog. You also have the ability to choose nofollow. This will only work for the keyphrase once per post, so you don’t have to worry about having spammy looking links in your posts.

6. Nofollow Case by Case
Gives you the ability to choose which comments don’t deserve follow tags and which do. This helps with comment spammers and allows you to look after the genuine commenters.

7. SEO Friendly Images
It’s important to SEO your images with alt tags – you can actually get lots of traffic from images. This plugin will ensure that your images are SEO optimized. If you forget to add alt tags, this plugin will add them for you.

8. SEO Post Link
When you set a post slug, sometimes they are too long and search engines don’t like that. This plugin will shorten the post slugs i.e http://www.bizboink.com/short-post-slug. The plugin will cut out unnecessary words, you can set it to a maximum number of words or characters

9. SEO Smart Links
Use this plugin for internal linking. By linking from one post to another, you can keep readers on your blog for longer. It can take a while to manually add those links, so use this plugin which will create a link to a certain page when you use a certain word/phrase.

10. SEO Title Tag
This allows you to make your post titles different to your title tags. By default wordpress will use your post titles as the title tag. The post title should be something catchy, but the title tag should be full of related phrases and synonyms which can help capture more visitors in a wider net.

11. Redirection
Whenever you need to move a page to another address(which happens somtimes), you can use this plugin to ensure a smooth redirection without losing your position in the search results.

12. Google Positioner
This plugins allows you to follow which keywords are bringing you visitors from the search engines. This helps monitor your search engine rankings.

13. Related Entries
This plugin allows you to output a series of related posts based on the keywords used in the post. This helps your readers move onto the next most relevant post.

14. WP Backlinks
This plugin allows you to manage reciprocal links with other websites. Whilst reciprocal links are not the best quality links you can get, they are still an important part of the overall SEO in Google’s eyes. They make your links look natural. Be sure to only trade links with related sites with good page rank.

15. Wordpress Global Translator Plugin
Make your blog available in over 41 different languages. Gives you a much bigger audience.

Next time we will be revealing 15 Wordpress plugins to pimp your blog

15 Wordpress SEO Plugins You Can’t Live Without is a post from: i7o Media

Many bloggers, especially beginners are faced with the dilemma of whether to get a free hosted blog or to fork out the money and get your own hosting and domain.

Free blogs such as wordpress.com, blogspot and typepad offer free hosted blogs which can be suitable as they reduce the technical overheads. This is especially appealing to those with little to invest and even less in tecnhical knowledge.

Whilst it may be free now, if you put considerable work into your blog and build up a following, you will soon realise that getting a free hosted blog was the worst decision you ever made.

Here’s why:

• You have serious lack of control over hosted blogs.

• What happens when you want to get a custom design and actually control what your visitors see? Having the ability to customize your blog is especially important when it comes to monetizing your blogs. Customization allows you to smoothly integrate your products, affiliate pages and other money making pages into your blog design. You can make your blog aesthetically pleasing aswell as highly functional.

• What happens if the hosting provider gets shut down? What happens to your blog posts from the last 2 years? What happens to all that page rank, authority and organic traffic you built up? It could all be gone in a heart beat. Go back to square 1 and start again?

• If your blog becomes popular, suddenly you are getting an influx of visitors and the number of simultaneous connections allowed may be limited by your host. Now your visitors get annoyed because they can’t view your blog, this will certainly test their love for your blog.

• With a self hosted domain, the possibilites of customisation are endless with thousands of themes, designs and plugins. If you plan to build a name/brand, then this will provide a much greater level of trust and credibility.

• You will be taken more seriously. I know some people will say “Hey I’ll follow a blog regardless of whether it is self hosted or not”. I understand that, but the harsh reality is – many people hate hosted blogs. If you choose a hosted blog – you better be packing some damn high quality in those posts, because content is going to be extremely crucial for you.

If you are still floundering around on a hosted blog, it is time to learn the ropes of hosting and domain registration, trust me, it really isn’t as daunting as you think and the rewards are endless.

You Shall Self Host is a post from: i7o Media

Before you even write your first word on a blog, it is important to carefully choose a blogging platform. I’m talking about platforms such as wordpress, blogger, typepad, blogsmith etc.

You may choose a free option now, but what happens in the future when your blog grows? What happens when it turns into a recognisable brand and you now need to migrate to a new platform and perhaps your own hosting?

There are tools available which can make this transition more manageable, but this is something that you should look to avoid. If you have grand plans for your blog and you can see yourself blogging long term, then it is smart to carve out the details now, get yourself set up with your own hosting and a suitable platform. You may have initial costs of domain registration and hosting, but the costs will be much higher if you choose to migrate at a later date, not to mention the frustration if you aren’t tech savvy.

Platform Features
The best thing about blogs is that most blogging software makes it ridiculously easy to create and publish content. If you have limited knowledge of HTML, look for a platform with a WYSIWYG editor – this will make it even easier!

Blogging Platforms
Wordpress(.org) – is the most popular blogging platform to date. Because of the immense popularity, wordpress has thousands and thousands of developers creating useful plugins and themes – many of which are free. Wordpress is free to download and once installed on your hosting, it is 100% modifiable. Infact, you can turn a wordpress blog into anything.

I have even created squeeze pages and sales letters from the wordpress platform, you wouldnt even recognise it – sure they aren’t blogs in the traditional sense, but whenever I make a small update – out go the pings, twitter updates, RSS etc. My competitors with boring old html pages, have no idea how I smash them in the google rankings. Wordpress truly is a great piece of software and it’s here to stay.

Wordpress(.com) – dont confuse this with wordpress.org! This is a blog hosted on the wordpress site. Suitable for those who dont have hosting. The domain will be h.ttp://yoursite.wordpress.com

This is fine if you are not 100% committed to your blog and you just want to have some fun. Since it is hosted on wordpress servers, you have less control over things such as plugins, customization and themes.

On top of that, if you eventually decide you want your own domain and hosting, you can not 301 redirect your pages to your new address because wordpress has control over the servers. This is the biggest problem I can see with free solutions. However, at the end of the day, free is free and it’s always hard to beat.  It all depends on your situation.

Blogger – a free blogging platform from Google. Bloggers are given a subdomain – h.ttp://yoursite.blogspot.com. Blogger is really not that great. You have even less control than wordpress.com, for example you don’t have full control over the meta tags unless you can modify the code. A good indicator is that only 3 out of the official top 100 bloggers use blogger.

Blogger has also become popular for spammy purposes so it’s reputation and ranking is dropping. Look elsewhere.

MovableType – a highly professional platform featuring numerous weblogs, making it especially user-friendly for those who have several blogs to manage. All the templates, tagging, user interface and file management are customizable.

The biggest advantage of movabletype is the Perl-Based functionality offering the same, if not more features than wordpress. MySQL, Postgres, SQLite and Berkeley DB and supported. Pages can be created to be static or dynamic – a great feature which I will explain more later.

MovableType is Popular amongst professional bloggers

Typepad – this is the hosted version of MovableType, no hosting required here. You have to pay for this though – around $5 a month for basic version which allows 1 blog. Packages go all the way up to $90 a month.

Here is the biggest problem – it once again involves 301 directs. If you start with a h.ttp://yoursite.typepad.com instead of your own domain, you wont be able to map your URL to your domain IF you eventually choose to get your own domain name. This functionality is possible but it is included in a more expensive package. If you start with your own domain name, you WILL be able to implement 301 permanant redirects to a new host and platform if you choose to relocate.

Also important to note – link value is forfeited if you ever make the switch.

Other popular platforms include Blogsmith, Gawker, Expression Engine and Drupal.

Most Important: Before you rush out and choose a blogging platform, ask yourself the following questions:

- What are your goals? Can you see yourself committing to this blog? Is it personal or for your company?

- What’s your budget? Can you afford to pay for domain names and hosting? Do you have funds to have a custom design made?

- How tech savvy are you? If something goes wrong with the tech-side of things, can you fix it? Or will you need to pay someone to fix that buggy blog software you chose?

Answer these questions and you should get some sort of idea on what blogging platform you should employ.

Why Choosing the Right Blogging Platform is Essential is a post from: i7o Media