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.