Lots! However what I’ll try to do is focus mainly on the types of hosting a blogger is most likely to encounter. This will greatly limit the scope, as well as keep it interesting. I can tell you for example that some companies I’ve personally worked with (more than one) have many computers acting as one, each with multiple processors and Gigs of Ram. However I doubt many, if any, blogger needs this kind of horsepower. So let’s looks at the realistic options for blogging from the smallest to probably the reasonably largest most bloggers will get to. And if you need hosting beyond the largest, you’re knowledge is probably beyond the scope of what I’m going to offer for this series. So without further ado…

Shared Hosting

This is typically the type of hosting most people start with. Why? Because it’s by far the cheapest! Hands down, you can’t beat the price. Of course with the lower price comes some issues, especially if your hosting company is not as ethical as it should be. Because this is going to be the most common type of hosting for beginner bloggers, I’ll take talk about this type of hosting more than the others (this entire post will just be about shared hosting). However do note that the last type of hosting I’ll mention in the next article in this series, dedicated hosting, is generally more involved than shared hosting. I’m just not going to cover it in as much detail because most starting bloggers never make it to that point. Unfortunately much like exercising, most bloggers start with great intentions but usually stop within a short amount of time..

Getting back to shared hosting, what is shared hosting? Shared hosting is where many people share the same computer to host many domains. This can be as little as just two domains, but often it ends up being many domains on the same computer. Each person’s domain is seperated by their accounts, although they are still hosted from the same computer. There are many pros and cons to this setup, of which the biggest pro is pricing. Let’s say you can get a dedicated service (you’re very own computer) for $200/month, which is relatively normal for an intermediate level dedicated server, then could you not divide that server up to host many smaller domains that have smaller resource needs and charge them individually? So let’s say we charge $10/month, then if we had 20 people we’d be breaking even (not counting time and effort), assuming those 20 people used less combined resources than the dedicated server has.

The reality is that most shared hosting accounts use very little resources, almost negliable. Some do use a lot, but the majority use very little. Which is why shared hosting can be done so cheaply. I’ve seen it go as low as $3/month per domain! That’s cheap! For less than the price of one Starbucks coffee per month, you can host your very own domain. That’s great!

However for $3/month, you can’t expect to get great service. Think about it a little. Firstly, that means they’re charge you $36/year for hosting. Now even though they can automate much of the sign up process, let’s look at the support costs. A qualified person will cost at least $30/hour for technical support. And remembering that most people who use shared hosting are new to hosting, they’ll probably have some questions. Yes you can template a lot of the questions, but to a point.

Therefore to compensate what many of the less ethical hosting companies do is overload their servers. If you remember as I mentioned a few minutes ago, the majority of the people who purchase shared hosting rarely even use a small portion of their resources, so why not use this into the equation. So what they’ll do is oversell, much like airlines oversell their tickets to compensate for people who miss their flights. However they’ll greatly oversell it. For example, they’ll have a dedicated server that can handle up to 100Gb a month, but what they’ll do is sell 1000Gb of bandwidth a month, knowing that most people will barely use 1% of their resources. That’s server overloading.
And unlike an airline, when a plane is full, it’s full. With unethical shared hosting, they’ll just keep stuffing people on until it literally bursts. With these types of companies you’ll find that if you contact technical support it will take a long time to get a response, if there is an issue with your hosting, it will take forever to get it fixed, as well, the service will be bumpy (the money just isn’t there).

What does it mean the service will get bumpy? Well, like the example above, when they get close to overloading a server, that is as it’s running close to its real full capacity (it’s actually using 100Gb of the 1000Gb sold), it will start to get slower responding to requests for the webpages on your website. Eventually it will get so slow that it will time-out, which means the web browser will just assume the web server is down rather than wait forever. At this point these hosts will generally try to re-balance themselves.

Now that I’ve talked about the cons, please don’t let me disuade you from shared hosting. If done right, it can be an amazing resource for you when you’re starting! I started this way myself. It’s just that you need to be careful like anything else. The cheapest is not always the best, especially for shared hosting. Reputation is worth a lot! Look for it. One of the best forums I’ve seen to read about other people’s experience on almost every hosting company I’ve ever been interested in is WebHostingTalk.com. Great site! It’s worth the time.
Shared hosting done right is marvellous if you find it. It can drastically bring down your hosting costs, especially if you’re starting. No one wants to pay $200/month for a dedicated box when they can pay $10/month for shared hosting that will be more than enough to fulfill their hosting needs!

Honestly, expect to pay at least $100/year for hosting. I’ve tried many services when I first started, and I know many people who’ve done tried others as well. We’ve all found that this is where the service gets reliable and they don’t overload their servers.

Also, as a disclaimer, let me say that I personally offer shared hosting for $100/year for the first domain and $50/year for each additional domain (once you’re in the system I can amortize your setup, support, etc. costs from the first year and just charge resource costs). This is also why I’m saying you should be able to get reliable shared hosting at this price range. I’ve managed to offer it, and it makes economical sense from a business perspective without overloading the servers. I refuse to overload my servers, I’d rather have to charge more and have less customers (all of which are happy) than charge less and have unhappy customers! If I offered the price any lower, I don’t know that I could do it without sacrificing something else… If you’re interested in getting hosting from me, you can contact me directly at steph@followsteph.com. So far the hosting I’ve offered has been solely through word of mouth. I’ve been happy with the results!

Getting back to the article, now one thing to remember is that shared hosting doesn’t offer unlimited resources (avoid those that do, it’s not economically possible). Eventually you will outgrow shared hosting if you become successful. For example, with the hosting I offer you get 200Mb of disk space and 10Gb of bandwidth. For most people, that should last them for quite a while. However if you get very successful, this will eventually become too small for you (I hope you achieve this, it’s great to have to pay more for hosting as it shows you’ve grown!). This is where you’ll need to start looking at other hosting solutions, which will be the discussion of the next article in this series.