Find Web Hosting For Your WordPress Blog

WordPress is the king of blogging scripts, and you’d like to use it to start a blog. You don’t want to settle for wordpress.com’s hosted version, however — you want full control over everything. Where do you go? Well, there are plenty of choices, and a few key things to look for when choosing a web host. Once you’ve got one, it’s a simple matter of installing the script and starting your blog.

First place to look is WordPress.org’s list of recommended hosts. The hosts pay to be listed here so it’s basically an advertisement, but it’s still an excellent place to start looking. You can find it on wordpress’s main site.

Of the ones on the above list, I’d like to personally vouch for MediaTemple. They’re a bit more expensive (cheapest plan is 20$/month) but if you plan to run multiple websites, or you get a lot of traffic, it’s a great provider. In my experience with it, I’ve seen it handle huge traffic spikes with ease.

Beyond the list, there are a few other recommendations I’d like to make. A Small Orange is a nice, simple, cheap web host. 25$ a year for everything a beginning blogger needs.

1and1 is also a cheap host. They’re fine for most, but I had a bad experience with them. I had their shared Linux hosting plan, and a traffic spike to my blog brought down my site — as well as all the other sites on the shared server my blog was hosted on. I got a politely worded email from them telling me to upgrade to VPS hosting or find a new host. I’ve heard other people rave about 1and1, though, so my experience might not be typical.

Of course, the world is full of thousands of web hosts. I can’t list every single one here. Instead, I can show you what to look for. In addition to meeting the minimum requirements for wordpress (support for PHP and a MySQL database, as well as optional mod_rewrite support for pretty URLs), there isn’t really much you’ll need. Most blogs are pretty lean in filesize — unless you’re doing podcasting or videocasting you won’t need more than a few hundred megabytes of disk space, and nearly every host offers much more than that. Because of the low file size, your bandwidth needs will probably be low as well. In most cases you’ll be capped for cpu or memory use on the shared server before you even come close to meeting your bandwidth cap. You’ll be best off with a Linux host that uses Apache, but that also describes most web hosting providers, and a Windows-based host should work nearly as well in most cases. If you don’t know the difference, then don’t sweat it.

Since nearly every host you find will meet the minimum requirements, and the file size/bandwidth requirements of wordpress blogs are minuscule, so price and reliability are the big things. Find some reviews of the host before you purchase an account.

Once you have your hosting paid for, it’s time to install wordpress. This is a very simple procedure, and it’s documented very well on wordpress.org (which is also where you’ll download the wordpress script). Once it’s installed, you’re good to go! Happy blogging!