Web Hosting for Your Blog: Should I take the VPS Route?

During your blogging endeavor, you will experience occasional growing pains. One of such bumpy ride is when your current shared web hosting account can no longer sustain your blog’s growth. Some tips from my experience…

My business blog, Noobpreneur.com, is experiencing some road blocks during its lifetime. While stream of blog posts are not an issue, the technical issues related to run the blog smoothly is troublesome to me ; okay, okay – maybe an occasional bogging burnout, but it’s nothing compared to the headaches related to the technical issues of my blogs.

I initially signed up with Discount Web Hosting providers for my sites before Noobpreneur.com, but then I come up with this “brilliant” idea.

I decided to sign up for HostGator reseller plan, mainly because I want to establish some blogs at the same time. A reseller plan can allow you to host dozens if not hundreds of sites. A good plan to start off on a budget, right?

Well, what seemed like a good plan turns bad, as Noobpreneur.com grows steadily every month – to the point that it takes too much resources from the web server plan I signed up for, thus affecting the resource allocation of my other sites on the same plan.

Not stopping there, Noobpreneur.com was suspended by HostGator for excessive resource usage (the blog takes too much CPU power of the web servers, thus making other sites (that were not mine) to load slowly.)

I then migrated Noobpreneur.com to GreenGeeks, and I experience the same suspension. I tried to cache everything, but with the blog visited by more than 2,000 unique visitors a day (3,000-is as of today) I was suggested to upgrade to self-managed VPS plan – a move that is not going so smoothly, mainly because I suck at web hosting management. Access to the website is disrupted on regular basis, causing the blog to lose traffic.

So, I then decided to go back to HostGator, after consulting with some hosting review sites for the Best VPS hosting providers, but this time I sign up for its fully-managed VPS hosting plan. Problem solved.

In the near future, I will probably need to sign up with dedicated hosting plan… until then, I’ll just read more hosting reviews to shortlist the Best Dedicated Hosting providers to sign up with.

Lessons learned – plus some tips

If you are really serious about building your blog as a business, you need to ensure that it is up 100 percent if possible (99.9 percent would be sufficient, though…) Otherwise, you will lose traffic because surfers will be turned off accessing a seemingly dead website.

Consider this example: If your blog is down for 4 hours and yours is visited by 3,000 uniques a day, then you are losing about 500 visitors a day; that’s significant, I suppose?

That being said, the more popular your blog, the more you need for web hosting offering superior services. Don’t go frugal at this point of your blog’s life cycle; in fact, you cannot afford to go frugal, as you are losing trust and opportunities doing so.

One more tip: Don’t be afraid to splash out cash on web hosting services. You should also consider cloud hosting that is picking up in popularity these days. Cloud hosting providers are typically guarantee a 100 percent uptime – meaning, your blog will never go offline whatsoever; it usually costs you more compared to conventional web hosting, through…

Whenever it makes sense (e.g. your blog’s income is greater than expense,) you need to upgrade to better hosting plan – or migrate to another better quality web hosting provider. It’s better to be safe than sorry, right?