Blog Web Hosting

In the past two years with the explosion of blogging on the Internet many web hosts have focused on bloggers. Wordpress, Blogger, b2evolution, Typepad and Six Apart are all popular blog software. Today you can get some affordable wordpress web hosting that comes with great support and even a 30-day money back policy. The hosting companies have made it so easy to install the wordpress and a few other software they often offer a one-click install.

Some of the basic features you’ll need for hosting your blog are:

PHP version 5.0 or greater
MySQL version 4.0 or greater

Even though Wordpress can run on PHP 4.4.x it’s a good idea to find a web host that offers or has PHP5. There are numerous applications that run with wordpress that will need the higher version of PHP.

Also ensure that the hosting company has a good support department and a phone number and email address you can contact them at. Having phone support is important as sometimes it’s just quicker to call up a host and have them fix what you need done. Whereas with email support you can often wait several hours before you get an email back.

Once you have your web hosting you might want to look at the top plug-ins for blogs:

- Akismet – Simply the best Spam protection
- WP-PostViews – Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.
- Simple Tags – A plugin does everything related with tagging.
- FeedBurner Feedsmith – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner
- Twitter Tools – This plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
- twistermc.com – can display image links, or as I like it, as text links.
- Lightbox 2 – Lightbox is the best effect you can find for an image gallery.

Enjoy hosting your own blog. If you are serious about blogging, do not go with a free blogger account or so.

Matt recommends Liquidweb for hosting a blog. Their hosting comes with tons of scripts for automated installation of blogs.