Hosting is an important terminology especially in the blogosphere. Why? A good host is needed for storing your blog files as well as helping you with fast internet connectivity. New bloggers often like to blog using the two most popular hosted platforms– WordPress and Blogger.

But as one achieves blogging success and experience, a general shift to having a (own) domain & hosting has been noticed.

To make the transformation a smooth one you need to understand all the types of hosting options available to a blogger. A wrong choice for hosting can lead to a lot of discomfort and unnecessary cost to you. That is why selecting a good hosting company that offers round-the-clock support and near 100% uptime is considered the biggest challenge for a blogger.

There are many types of hosting packages available to a blogger such as shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting, hybrid hosting, grid hosting etc. Shared hosting is the one, most suited for first time bloggers with small or medium sized blogs. They are less costly and there are many packages to choose from (based on your requirements). For example for $5 you might be able to host atleast one domain name/blog. Whatever be the price, look for the added features of the package that you choose.

Examples of shared hosting providers include Host gator and Dream host. Avoid going for shared hosting if there is high load as you may end up with a temporary suspension. Another hosting option very similar to shared hosting is the Virtual Private Server (VPS). If you use VPS as your host you can be sure of getting a dedicated part of the server resources such as RAM, CPU etc. VPS gives you the feeling that your blog is hosted all alone when infact you are sharing it with many sites. VPS is a bit costly though but then provides you with greater access.

Having a dedicated server will help those bloggers who have grown big over the years, in terms of size – those who need more bandwidth and disk space. Having a dedicated server lets you run the whole show (reboot whenever you want). Ofcourse this can get very costly too. Then we have the grid hosting (thanks to Media Temple) which is very similar to shared hosting but overcomes many of the problems faced by shared hosting.

For example, Grid hosting helps in spreading the load (when the load is high) to different machines to make sure your site is up always. A reseller hosting lets you have the benefit of reselling your hosting space to other blogs when required. More over you get more space as well as bandwidth using reseller hosting. We also have hybrid solutions (such as Amazon S3) which are a mix of all good features of other hosting solutions.