If your are serious with your blogging you are going to want to host your own blog. By hosting your own blog you get complete control over every aspect of the blog. You can use any layout you want and you can install all the plugins and addons you want to give your blog exactly the functions you want. It can seem like an unnecessary expense to get your own hosting when there are free blog hosts available. Although free blog hosts might seem like a good option when you first start out you will find that it wont really fit your need when your blog has grown bigger. It can at that point be rather hard and complicated to move your blog from free hosting to your own hosting. It is therefore worth getting your own paid hosting right from that get go as the savings later on will overshadow the expenses you get initially. Regardless of whether you get a free blog or a blog hosted on a paid hosting account you should always get a domain name. It is well worth the cost. You can find a domain name to use for less than USD 10. We recommend that you get a .com domain and not an info domain even if the info domain is cheaper. Info domains can however be a good choice in some cases when you are building an information based blog.

Hosting does not need to be expensive but it is usually a good idea to avoid the cheapest hosts as the quality of their services not always are up to pair. It is better to pay a bit more and get hosting from a reputable host that is know to take good care of their clients. A couple of good hosts are liquidweb, hostgator and jaguar hosting. A popular web hosting provider that is best avoided as the service they offer are not worth the price you have to pay is godaddy. Their hosting lacks some important functions you get with most other hosting providers.

One important fact to know when you are choosing hosting is that unlimited never means unlimited. It is usually better to choose hosting that clearly states how much bandwidth, disk space etc you can use. The host that say they offer unlimited this or that will still ask you to move your site or pay for a more expensive package if you use what they consider as being too much server resources. In a worst case scenario these hosts might just disabled your account until you moved the site or paid for a more expensive packages causing down time. Down time is something very negative and that should be avoided by any means possible. Only choose host that guarantees and are know for keeping a very high up time. The up time should be as close to 100% as possible.

Before you start looking for a host you should make a list of what you need. If you want to keep a wordpress blog you will need a host with PHP support and with mod rewrite enabled (Not necessary but very strongly recommended). The host should also make automatic back ups. It is not very hard to move your self hosted blog to a new host nor is it hard to upgrade your account with the hosting provider if needed and it is therefore usually enough to choose one of the starter packages offered by the hosting company and update as needed.