Website Hosting for Your Benefit (not mine)

(Reading time: 7 – 11 minutes)

This article on website hosting was the very first article published on Website In A Weekend. This is the fourth update, which features extensive revisions, including discussion about non-WordPress website hosting solutions.

Money? (Your fundamental question)

Before going any further, there is one question which needs an accurate answer: Are you planning-at any time-to use your website for making money?

If you are not interested in making money with your website, you have a lot of options and we’ll cover some of those presently. But let’s make sure we’re on the same page about this money thing.

3 methods for making money with websites

Making money with a website is simple in concept. Here’s the gist of it:

1. Sell your goods and services
2. Sell other people’s goods and services
3. Sell advertising

Often, people do well using a combination of two or three of these methods. This is important because choosing how your website is hosted often depends on what kind of business you plan to conduct. Specifically, do you want to be completely in charge of your own site, or do you want have your site maintained for you?

The difference between maintaining it yourself (self-hosted) versus having it maintained for you (hosted) is usually limitations based on the amount and kind of business you’re allowed to operated when your site is hosted for you.

Let’s take a closer look at the hosted and self-hosted models.

Hosted vs. Self-hosted

Finding a website hosting provider is the absolute first step for getting a web site. You have two choices:

1. Hosted website: you allow someone else or a company to administer all of the administrative details in return for giving up control of capability and being subject to the host’s business conditions. Typically, websites hosted for free are required to serve ads for the hosting company, and not allowed to conduct business. With some fee-based hosting services, you may be allowed completely free reign for business activity (local statutes permitting).
2. Self-hosted website: you have a high degree of freedom (limited mostly by statute) to use your hosting account for whatever purpose you choose. Most people start with what’s known as a shared hosting account, which is easy, fast and inexpensive, but will be outgrown as your website becomes more successful.

If you’re really serious about getting on the web, you’ve probably made the decision to use a self-hosted account. Since you’re here, you have also made the decision to use WordPress as your website technology.

Good choice.

Nearly all web site hosting providers now support WordPress, and most of these all have very easy-to-use installation scripts allowing to install your WordPress web site very quickly and easily.

As noted previously, shared hosting is a very good choice for getting started with WordPress, but it’s not your only choice. In fact, there are at least a half dozen popular hosting models, many of which are discussed in this very long article on WordPress hosting.

If you aren’t ready for self-hosting, and you aren’t sure you want to use WordPress, no worries. Just skip over this part to read about other useful website and blogging platforms.

There are many hosting services, including Siteground, GoDaddy, Dreamhost and Bluehost, but I like Bluehost well enough to give it a recommendation and to become a sales affiliate. Bluehost’s terms of service will not allow affiliates to provide any financial incentive, otherwise I would – personally – provide a money-back guarantee for your satisfaction. I feel Bluehost is that reputable. Since I can’t provide such guarantee, here’s both affiliate and non-affiliate links:

• Signup at Bluehost (Help support Website In A Weekend!)
• Signup at Bluehost (WIAW makes no commission).

Choose the link you feel most comfortable using.

You’re free to choose any other hosting service as well. If your choice of hosting services provides a cPanel administrative interface, that’s even better. You may even have a friend or relative who can provide free hosting. However, be aware that website hosting with friends should be done with care to preserve both your business and your friendship.

After you purchase hosting

Once you purchase hosting, you will get one or emails to:

1. Confirm your purchase.
2. Confirm your administrative username and password.
3. Provide details for FTP accounts and other necessary services.

Save all of these emails! Label or tag them so that you can find them in the future. Print them out if you must, and put them into a folder or a binder.

Ready?

Great! You’re done here.

Now let’s get started installing WordPress.

Other website and blogging platforms

While self- (or paid-)hosted WordPress power the vast majority of small business websites, there are many other alternatives, both free and paid. Here are a few of the more popular.

• WordPress.com: An excellent choice for many people who want the power of WordPress without the commitment of operating their own website. WordPress.com is owned and operated by Automattic, Inc., and it’s the same software running WordPress blogs and websites everywhere. Basic accounts for WordPress.com are free. If you would like to operate your business, a range of addon fees to provide a domain name, custom styling and like are available.

  If you’re a consultant, and business or engineering services are your focus, this may well be your best option.

• Typepad: If you want a low hassle, high powered blog, you might check into Typepad. While not as large as WordPress, Typepad holds its own with bloggers who want to concentrate on writing more than marketing. Entry level prices are competitive, and very good value considering your maintenance costs (i.e., your time spent maintaining) disappear.
• Blogger: One of the very first blogging applications, now owned and operated by Google. If you have a Google account, you can set up a Blogger blog very quickly. Blogger features posting by email, domain name mapping, Picasa integration for images and publication from Google Docs. If your blogging needs are not extensive, and your interest is mostly in hobby or perhaps technical blogging and not business or marketing, a Blogger blog may be all you need.

  Also, if you’re old school and haven’t checked out what Blogger has been up to lately, check out this article on design Blogger templates. You might be surprised. I was.

• Posterous: If you write fast, post frequently, and your purpose is exposure, Posterous is happy to take care of most of the fiddly details for running a blog-driven website for you. I use Posterous for small blogging articles and snippets, half-baked ideas, crazy notions, all sorts of writing that isn’t appropriate for the main Website In A Weekend blog (what you’re reading here and now). Check out Website In A Weekend on Posterous.

  Posterous also features posting by email, for both public and private posts, custom theming, and you can operate your own domain name. This last feature is popular with small Silicon Valley startups who want to run a blog, but don’t have time to operate a full-blown WordPress site. It’s easy for them to set up a subdomain for their company blog using Posterous.

• Tumblr: Do you take a lot of pictures? Make infographics? Create short yet rich, dense content? And you want it all done fast, free and easy? Tumblr may be the place for you. Actually, Tumblr isn’t exactly a “blogging” service. All content is treated more or less equally, in contrast to a blog’s emphasis on writing, with images, audio and video more as supporting elements. Perhaps even more interesting is Tumblr’s model for community and social interaction, which is similar to Twitter in the way: following another user’s Tumblr account results in that user’s feed integrating with yours. It’s very cool, and worth checking out in any case.

You may find one or more of these services useful as adjunct to your main WordPress powered site, for both SEO backlinking support and for reaching new user communities. Your mileage may vary!

Questions? Comments? Suggestions?

As noted in the preface, this article has been revised to reflect the current state of hosting for small business websites.

I’d be delighted to hear more about your hosting experience, both hosted and self-hosted, in the comments below.

Note: Every time this article refreshes, I get comment spam from hosting companies and affiliate marketers attempting to poach my readers (that’s you!) to sell you sketchy hosting packages full of promises and empty of benefits. If this is you, do not poach my readers! I will ruthlessly delete your comment.