If you already have a website – you can skip this step.

Are you looking to build a blog? In our previous post, we discussed purchasing a domain name.  The domain name is the unique address of your website or blog often known as the URL.  The next step is to find a hosting site.  The hosting site is the physical space on the internet where your blog or web page resides.

Without a web hosting plan, your blog will not be live on the internet and nobody will be able to find it. When you purchase a hosting plan you’re effectively buying yourself disc space and bandwidth on your hosting company’s servers. It’s where you will store all of your website files, and it’s this server that allows visitors to visit your site and leave comments.

Things to Consider

To ensure your blog is always online and fast, you need to choose reliable web hosting.   Some things you will want to consider when selecting a web host:

Space – Starting out you won’t need a huge amount of space, but will you have room to grow?  Should at least start with 1500 MB of space

Broadband – Is their room to grow?  Should have no less than 20 GB Bandwidth, 100 GB is better.

Guarantee – Look for two guarantees. 1)  Money back within 30 days if unhappy.  2) Uptime Guarantee should be at least 95%

Support – Is it 24/7?

Reliability – This is the Uptime Guarantee.   No less than 95%

Transfer –  help if moving from a different site?

Backups – Are they included and is there an extra charge?

Restores – Extra Cost?

Themes – Are any Themes provided in a getting started package? How expensive are the paid themes?

Graphics – Do they provide any graphics help in startup packages?

Learning Modules – Any educational courses, training or videos offered free of charge with the purchase?

Price – Make sure you are getting the appropriate bang for your buck!

Here at Upstream Marketing, we recommend GoDaddy as a hosting platform.  But we have had clients who have had huge success with others as well.

So there you have it, your second step to building your B2B business blog.