While hosting this blog over the last few years, I’ve had short and long-term stints with a variety of web hosting providers. And I changed my Webhost just recently once again!. Selecting a Web hosting provider who suits your real needs are never an easy task. You usually don’t get a chance to try before buy – as many of them does not provide a trial-period.
Free and Forever option
If you want your blog to live ‘forever’, without requiring you to make payments etc, the best option is to go for hosted blogging services like WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr. The advantage with these providers are that, you don’t have to pay for the storage and maintenance of your site. Moreover if you want to use a specific top level domain as your Web address, they support them too. The disadvantage being lesser options to customize the look n Feel and functionality of your blog. Sometimes providers like WordPress deny you placing ads on such blogs to monetize your content. I started blogging at BlogSpot and Jroller. Presently I maintain a Posterous and Tumblr Log.
Shared Web Hosting
Here you will be provided a virtual workspace to deploy and manage your blog software (like WordPress, Drupal etc). To assist, you are mostly given a easy to use control panel. In this type of hosting, you are essentially sharing the computing resources with others, in a not-so-isolated fashion. The advantages are better scalability, good support and cheap rates. If you are unlucky to share the resources with a high-load blog/site, you will ultimately suffer!. Sometimes, these providers despite offering unlimited bandwidth and storage restrict you with storage-file-types(for e.g. only text/html files) and CPU utilization. If you happen to exceed these limits (e.g If you are SlashDotted or Dugg), there is no option to increase the capacity on demand. I have used BlueHost and SiteGround earlier.
Grid Hosting
This is a newer trend propagated by the enthusiasm around ‘Cloud Computing’. Most of their mechanics are similar to Shared Web Hosting, but the differentiator is “On Demand Scalability”. To make your blog highly available and scalable, the backend-databases (e.g MySQL) here are mostly deployed as hot swappable instances / clusters. The ‘elastic behavior’ of the service makes it a popular choice these days. I have used MediaTemple earlier.
Slice / VPS Hosting
This requires you to completely manage the virtual hardware infrastructure provisioned to you over Zen / VMWare etc. You are responsible for everything on this. You may have to start by setting up a firewall itself – as the provisioned image/slice is just a raw one. Some providers gives you an option to bake your favorite Linux / BSD distribution on creation. Usually such slices have limited storage and non-shared exclusive but limited RAM (e.g 256 MB). This is an excellent solution if you have good Linux/Unix experience – as there is not really a limit to what you can do with the slice (e.g Run Java Server, Proxy Service etc). Backups are provided mostly as simple scheduled clone of your virtual instance/ slice. Dynamically resizing the storage and RAM are supported mostly. You are experiencing this blog on a Slice with SliceHost!
Who are the Vendors?
Word of the mouth (or Twitter!) is a big factor in estimating the popularity of the Vendors in the above Web Hosting Categories. You may search through Twitter or Ask your friends ( or Me!) to get an opinion. There are specialized services on the Web (recommended) like WebHostingGeeks who keeps updated ranked lists of Vendors with real customer reviews and ratings. They regularly have vendors with shared hosting to those who provide a high-end dedicated server.