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Blog Hosting

One of the most common types of websites today is what is known as a blog. The “blog” started out as a personal online journal for many people but has now been expanded for many uses. It now can range from a personal online diary to a major news reporting site. With blogs being so popular, you may want to start your own blog to make your opinions known to the world. However, before you start a blog, you should consider what it takes technically to maintain a blog. Because of this, you will need to know the hosting requirements of a blog and the possible choices you have.

In the world of blog hosting there are two routes to go, you can host your blog with a service such as blogger or you can buy your own web hosting service and install your own blog. Which one of these you choose will depend on what kind of service you are looking for and how much customization you desire for your blog.

We will first look at hosting a blog with a service such as blogger.com . The benefits of this option are not having to worry about technical problems and having a solid blogging software to run your blog with. The minuses of this option are limited flexibility in customization, having to put up with blogger.com’s advertising banners, and not having ftp access to the server your blog is hosted on. Hosting with a large service such as blogger.com means that you generally will have very little downtime and you will never have to worry about configuring your server. Blogger.com’s technical staff will take care of all those details and if there are server or technical troubleshooting issues, its effecting more than just you and their technical staff will quickly resolve those issues. Hosting with blogger also means you have a solid piece of blog software to run our blog off of. You will never have to worry about updating the software to get the newest features because blogger.com will update the features of their services as soon as updates are available. However, hosting with such a service means you will not have your choice of blogging software. You are limited to their system and what it has to offer. Although what they offer can be quite extensive, it does limit your ability to customize your blog. The second minus is that you will have to put up with blogger.com’s advertising banners. In order to pay for the servers and turn a profit, services such as blogger.com have to put banners and advertisements on your blog. Usually these advertisements are not too intrusive but many people don’t like having advertisements on their pages at all. The last thing is that you usually do not have direct FTP service to the server which means that your uploading abilities are limited. While most blog services today offer uploads of photos and other types of media, they still cannot match the flexibility of having true FTP access.

Now that we have looked at the benefits and setbacks of hosting with a blogging service, we will explore the alternative option of buying your own hosting space and installing a blog yourself. Blog hosting is more resource intensive than hosting regular HTML pages and will require a scripting language and a database system such as the PHP/MYSQL combination. Although usually not as intensive as forum hosting or CMS hosting, a popular blog can be a resource hog on a server. Since many hosts have TOS clauses that allows them to suspend account for too much CPU/RAM usage, you’ll want to read reviews and talk with customer support about such issues before diving in with a host. Try to find a host that has a low server load and lower than average accounts to server ratio. It is to your benefit to try and find a host that does not overall its resources. Services like Powweb,Ipowerweb, and other hosts that offer enormous plans for cheap prices are generally not where you want to look. Space and bandwidth is hardly ever an issue for blogs, but CPU/RAM requirements are. If you are running a really popular blog, then getting a Virtual Private Server or Dedicated server is the way to go as then you are guaranteed a good amount of CPU and RAM usage.

Once you have your hosting details figured out, you have to choose the blog software you wish to run with. To make things easier, I have compiled a short list of the most popular blogging software:

1. Wordpress (http://wordpress.org/) - Far and away the most popular blogging software available and the best one. Wordpress has all the features any advanced blog poster would want but is friendly enough to use for even newbies to blogging. This package can be used for a personal diary or as a fully fledged news posting service. With the many plugins available for wordpress, this blog engine can easily be turned into any kind of website. Be advised that some of the plugins are written by newbie programmers and will cause server issues.
2. B2evolution (http://www.b2evolution.net) – A great blog tool with an XHTML validator to produce clean code. B2 evolution also has a nicely integrated “skin” editor that allows you to customize the look of the blog without much prior programming knowledge.
3. Nucleus blogging software(http://nucleuscms.org/) – Nucleus is more of a CMS package than just a blogging software. It provides RSS feeds and the ability to optimize URLs for search engines. It has more advanced features than most blog software but is also more server-intensive in my opinion.
4. Geeklog(http://www.geeklog.net/) - A simple to use, feature-rich system that has many skins and customizations that you can download and use to suit your blogging needs.

Note that all these blogging systems have their advantages and disadvantages. Personally, I would go with Wordpress just because it is easy to write plugins for and the number of plugins and skins already available for it online. However, your needs may be different and another blogging solution may be th best for you. A good place to see all sorts of different blogging software is at hotscripts(http://www.hotscripts.com). This place has thousands of blogging(and other scripts) classified by which programming language they are built on. It will also tell you the requirements to run each software. Do your research carefully and choose wisely your blog hosting service and you will be on your way to blogging stardom.

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