Welcome to Day 3 of ‘How to start a travel blog and make money’ FREE email course!
OK, you have a blog name, a niche, and you have found out that your domain is available.
Let’s create your awesome travel blog!
Forget free blog websites like WordPress.com or BlogSpot. The best way to start a professional blog and make money is to pay a web hosting company (a host) and install WordPress (the software) on their servers.
What is a host? It’s basically a company that owns lot of computers in which the files of your website are hosted.
There are many hosting companies out there. You have probably read many blogs promoting a very popular company called BlueHost. Well, because we want to help you start a travel blog the right way without having problems in the future, we’ll tell you the truth…
BlueHost sucks!
We say this from our personal experience and the experience of many other bloggers we know. The travel blogger groups on Facebook are full of negative feedbacks on them.
Moreover, the fact is that the same bloggers who promoted this company on their blogs are not hosting with them anymore. So why do they keep promoting it? Because of the high affiliate rate the company pays for every new registered customer.
Bloggers make lot of money being affiliates with this company, but at the end of the day they know it’s one of the worst hosting companies out there.
Why are we saying this?
Their hosting service is slow and with frequent downtime. We experienced this ourselves when our blog was down for hours without receiving a single email warning us about it. Basically, if they think you are using ‘too many’ resources they just freeze your website.
“In 2009, BlueHost introduced a new feature to all customers – CPU throttling. CPU throttling simply refers to the process of reducing user’s CPU usage in whenever the particular user is pulling “too many” server resources at one time. At that particular time, BlueHost would freeze (or drastically reduce) client sites’ CPU usage substantially. This effectively shut down clients’ websites hosted on the BlueHost server for several hours throughout the day.” (Source: Wikipedia.com)
When this happens, and it will happen, you will spend many hours trying to get in touch with customer service, and once you deal with them, they will propose upgrading your plan because you are, again, using “too many” resources.
The problem is, being a very popular hosting company, they have hundreds of thousands of users whose website files they host in their computers. When they shut down the Slovak blog of Ivana, the guy from the customer service told us, “this is normal when you have 10,000 websites in one computer.”
Well, if a company that takes care of your files thinks this is normal and is not able to cope with a high number of clients, there is only one solution: change it!
We’ve found that their customer service is not really competent; this goes without saying about all the time you will spend waiting to get in touch with them.
Bloggers promote BlueHost as a cheap way to start with a host. The truth is the cheap price they are promoting is only valid if you buy their product for 3 years, and the discount is only valid for the first year. Besides, the free domain that they give you is only valid for 1 year, and every year they increase the price, as they did for us.
You cannot cancel your account online; you can only do so by calling via phone.
The domain privacy protection, the backup of your site, and the SSL protocols to secure your website, all these are sold separately as add-ons and will raise the final price you pay to create your account.
So, what’s the alternative?
There are many. Personally we use A2 Hosting. Before making the switch, we read many positive reviews about them, and we can say that we are really happy with their product, customer service, and reliability. If you want to, you can also read this a2hosting review and gather more information.
If you want to check their hosting, and you want to create your website with them, we have written a tutorial on our blog that explains step by step how to open an account and set up your WordPress site easily and quickly.
So head to our post, and if you need any help, please let us know. Just send us an email and we’ll do our best to answer all your questions.
PS: Of course, our links to A2 Hosting are affiliates, and we’ll take a small commission if you register with them, but we are recommending a company that we are happy with and trust. We would never recommend a company that we don’t use or that we know is unreliable.