The life of a work-at-home, homeschooling mom is a lot about taking care of things – for our families, for our spouses, for our work. But in all this it is very easy to let taking care of ourselves slip or even put on the back burner.

For the last few years I’ve been on a concentrated journey to regain my health. Something that was dangerously close to the edge the result of the first few years I worked at home. I pushed and pushed, trying to do it all, and in the meantime would forget to eat, put off exercising, and rarely slept. It messed with my thyroid, my metabolism, and caused a dangerous situation. Thankfully, I’ve been able to make recoveries, and while I still have a ways to go,  I am healthier now both physically and mentally than I have been in many years.

Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a hard, in-your-face crisis to get there. Tonight I pray for a dear friend, another work-at-home, homeschooling mom, who had a heart attack this week. Pushing too much, trying to do it all, is not good for anyone, including ourselves, obviously. But also not good for our families or our spouses.

I pray that others will take our lessons and not go through it themselves. Please don’t try to do it all, to fit it all in in one day. It’s not possible, nor is it reasonable to expect of yourself. Take the time for yourself, for your sanity, for your health, so that you can be whole and healthy. It’s not being selfish. It’s part of serving those around you. A healthy, sane mom and wife is worth more than a worn-out, tired, ill mom and wife.  Believe me. I know. Learning it the hard way isn’t fun.

Last night a friend and I were discussing websites, blogs, and business plans and little things that we were stumbling over. She shared that one of the things holding her back from launching her new website/blog was deciding on where to host it. I could totally relate, because that’s something that’s held me up on expanding my internet business plans for several years. Finally, last year I hit on a combination that I really like.

The first time, a few years ago, when I ventured out into the blogging community, I started on Blogger. In fact those blogs are still out there, even though I haven’t updated them in two years, and maybe one day I’ll port them over. I liked Blogger, and really liked how easy it was to use Picasa to post photos. But I wasn’t fond of the fact that Blogger determined if my blogs stayed or not and I really wanted more control over the blogs. I know several who are very happy with Blogger, but I decided I wanted to self-host my blogs.

By that time I had done enough research and decided on using Wordpress as my blog engine. I love the ease of using Wordpress and the number of tools, plugins, templates, and tutorials out there to help me. But hosting was a bit of an issue.

For my domain names I use Directnic.com, purely based on a recommendation from my techie brother. And I’ve stayed with them for all but two of my domian names. I like having the separation between host and domain registar. It gives me a comfort for some reason. And considering I switched web hosts 4 times in two years, it turned out to be a good thing. It is really easy for me to change the DNS server on my domains registered with Directnic.

For web hosts, I started out with one website on a shared private server. It was free and generous, but in order to make changes I needed to go through the administator. I couldn’t make the changes myself. So, without really doing a lot of research I moved to GoDaddy.com. I was inexperienced and ended up getting confused and buying more than what I needed and not exactly what I wanted. I still have one of my domains and one email account hosted through them. And I’ve been happy with that. I just don’t care for all the upselling. A little upselling is good (would you like fries with that?) but too many choices everytime I make a selection is overwhelming to me. So, I sought a simpler approach.

Based on a recommendation from a person I respect, I moved over to GOT-hosting.com. It was simple, helpful, and reasonably priced. I would have stayed with them, but as the number of sites our family needed/wanted grew, I started wondering if there was a solution that would be more cost effective for a large number of sites.

Well God has an amazing way of answering prayer. In a teleseminar on information products, Bob Bly mentioned a host that allowed unlimited domains to be hosted for one price – Hostgator.com.  I could hardly beleive it, but it is true. After checking out Hostgator’s site, flipping through their tutorials and help info, I talked to my hubby and we decided to try it with a new site I was creating for him. I found a coupon code that allowed me to get the first month’s hosting for a penny (yep, 1 cent!) and got started. Now I have all but one domain hosted with them and have been very pleased. So far I haven’t found anything I haven’t liked  – support has been great, all the abilities I wanted are there, and I’m not overwhelmed.

If you want to self-host a Wordpress blog, no matter what host you do go with, be sure they have Fantastico, so installing a Wordpress blog (and other neat tools) can be done very quickly and in a few simple steps.

Anyway, hope that helps someone. If you have gone down this road and have some insight, please share. We can all learn from each other.