How to Expand a Simple Website - Finding the Right Web Host
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The first step in upgrading your website is to ditch the freeweb hosting and to find a good quality web host, which is easier said than done. If you've done any kind of research online to try to find the best web host out there, it's nearly impossible! Most web hosting review sites are basically affiliate sites trying to make a few bucks, and so you have to take those reviews with a grain of salt.
A better way to find a good web host is to rely on referrals from friends that are happy with their web hosting. Another good way to determine a good, reliable web host is to visit popular blogs in your niche and find out which host they use. If that host is good enough for their blog, it will certainly be good enough for your needs as well.
Another consideration is obviously your budget. You should plan on spending between $3-$10 per month on a shared hosting account. New blogs with minimal traffic do notneed dedicated or virtual private server (VPS) hosting - these are way too expensive for the amount of bandwidth and disk space that you'll be needing.
I chose to go with WebhostGIANT for my hosting needs. The reason is that they were cheap ($2.79/month), had unlimited disk space, and unlimited bandwidth. Plus they offered a host of other features that I thought I could use when building my blog. After using this host for about seven months, I have to say that I'm pretty happy with their service and support.
When searching for a web host, I also needed to keep in mind the requirements that WordPress needs in order to function properly. These requirements include: PHP 4.3 or higher, MySQL 4.0 or higher, Apache or Litespeed recommended. WebhostGIANT satisfied those requirements, so I was good to go.
After obtaining my web hosting account, it was a matter of switching over my domain name servers (DNS) information at www.GoDaddy.comwhere my domain is registered, and I was ready to start creating my new blog. If you have trouble with this step, simply ask your web hosting support team to guide you through the process.
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