Blogging is your business which requires investment both in terms of energy, time and money. As time goes on your little blog will grow and draw attention of search engines and social media in terms of traffic. Visitors enjoy when you offer something unique and something that may help them and provide them with a reason to visit your blog. I started blogging in 2009 with blogger and as time passed I started enjoying it and this hobby turned into a profession. I needed a reliable company to help me expand this little blog so that tomorrow we could add new tools and resources to it. Readers deserve the right to be provided with an open forum where they could exchange ideas and interact more openly with one another. Off-topic questions often result in deletion and therefore a Forum becomes important when you want to keep things simple and clean. Google Blogs unfortunately doesn't allow access to the server where your files are hosted for free. Which means you can not create sub domains for your blog where you could add a Forum, portfolio page or services page. Thus a reliable web hosting company becomes a necessity.
Note: This is part1 of our series on choosing Best Hosting for your Blogs. I will be sharing my personal experiences here, technical details, personal help, web hosting plans and discount coupon codes.
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What is Web Hosting? What Difference will it make?
Web hosting in layman terms is simply buying a storage space for your website and all its files. Your files will be stored in secured hard disks owned by the web hosting company. Like all our files of services page, tools and Forum are stored at HostGator. The style sheets, the JavaScript, the HTML pages, images, videos and any media used on our website sub domains are stored in secured HostGator servers/computers.
You can create a whole new website and attach it to your blog. For example our services page which is still under development is a complete new website linked to our blog through a sub domain. What is sub domain? Its actually a sub part of your main domain. For example:
Domain
www.google.com
Sub Domains
services.google.com
forum.google.com.
portfolio.google.com
ebook.google.com
editor.google.com
Not just that, you will have free Email Accounts that will give you a professional Email address like.
nuxious@facebook.com
You can even create a wordpress blog with hostgator like everyone else. With web hosting you have a complete control on your website and you can equip it with anything you wish.
What is Domain hosting?
Domain hosting means that you are simply purchasing a custom URL like .com .net or .org etc. which may mask .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com. It costs around $10 to buy a domain from blogger itself. 80% Blogger users purchase domain instead of web hosting because they think that web hosting is a lot expensive and they can't afford it. They also live in a misconception that why buy hosting when Blogger provides it for free.
Its true that blogger blogs are hosted for free but with just domain hosting you are sacrificing a great investment. This is what you can not do with domain hosting:
You can not create sub domains
You can not create multiple email accounts
You can not create web pages
You can not create a Forum
You can not store or upload files
You can not learn and experience new tools and technologies
You will always run after free storage services. Everything on your blog will always be owned by someone else. From your contact forms to scripts that you use are stored on third party servers, thus making your blog's load time damn slow.
You will remain a Blogger and will never grow as a webmaster
Domain hosting costs around $10-$15 per year and web hosting costs less than $3.96 per month or $40-$45 per year. We waste hundreds of dollars per month but just $40 dollars per year will bring you in a much better and comfortable stage. You will learn playing with tools daily!
Why HostGator?
We never talked about web hosting and haven't written a single tutorial on it before. But now when I have personally experienced what it feels like to be a webmaster I can share its pros and cons. Its been a month now since we purchased web hosting for our blog and sub domains from HostGator. I always wanted to learn how forums works, how files are uploaded via ftp, how html web pages are created and stored on a server and etc. I thought all these things would require great technical skills and it would not be a good idea to put your money at risk. I lived with this thought for a year and just a month ago I realized how successful have my friends grown and I was there still depending on free lunch. I was scared how to start but then almost everyone whom I asked for suggestion recommended that we should choose HostGator as our web hosting company. I visited Hostgator's homepage and started my research. Whether I searched for the list of top 10 web hosting companies or best web host or best Forum host or best blog host, I found this blue crocodile every where.
Their homepage is full of awards and achievements that speak for itself but that still doesn't matter if your hosting company has a poor customer service. Their amazing 24/7 Live Chat service is something I can't stop praising. Without their excellent technical support I could not have learnt and experienced tons of things that I apply to this blog daily. We had to transfer our domain from old registrar to hostGator and for this we needed help and guidance. Amazingly HostGator helped us far more openly than our registrar who even lives in my town. Whether it may be a simple query or technical help, the agents at hostgator wont tell you what to do, they will themselves manage everything you want. My DNS settings along with Email Accounts were all setup by an agent for free. I just sat and relaxed.
About their technical details you may better visit HostGator Homepage.
HostGator is crazy
I really mean it! HostGator guys are simply crazy. On every special occasions they offer discounts as far as 80%. Hosting for three years which could cost $150 would cost you just $30! I will be updating you with such discount coupons in my coming posts.
If you register now using the coupon code below during the sign up process you will get 25% discount on any purchase your make.
Click this link and try it.
123927819218
If you are buying a hosting for just one year or two years then using the following coupon will give you $9.94 OFF
Click this link and try it.
5153557876
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