All posts by Craig

This is my Second Post| Acquiring Hosting

Your WordPress site requires hosting.  This is where the contents of your website will live.

You will purchase the URL for your website from a registrar.  You will then identify to the registrar on what name servers the site contents can be found.  The name servers tell the registrar where your content can be found.  These name servers are available from your hosting account.  You must acquire hosting before you can change the name servers.

There are many places to get hosting.  You can find very low-priced hosting that may provide you a location store your website information.  Often these low-priced providers do not provide good support and will end up with frequent or sometimes intermittent downtime.  If Google or one of the other search engines looks at your site while it is down, your rankings will be destroyed until the next time your site is crawled. Make sure you find reliable hosting, this will prevent any loss of rankings due to your site being invisible to the search engines when they look at it.

I have purchased hosting from several vendors.  I find that hostgator provides a reliable solution.  For a little more money Bluehost provides very good hosting services.  I have also used Go Daddy the past.  I find that Go Daddy is one of the more expensive hosting providers and they have an annoying tendency to hit you with up sells.  When I sign up for a hosting program, I want hosting I don’t want the myriad of other services that this host provides.

Of these three vendors, I would choose hostgator over the others.  It is inexpensive and reliable.  You can get enhanced services or just the basics. It is up to you to choose.