This is my first post here and I’m trying to decide what host to use on my first website. Currently i am on blogger but is going to transition to wordpress . Looking for suggestions or concerns.
Thanks in advance
hostgator is the best
Care to elaborate on that? 
@rapidservices, if you have some time you could also dig through our Review a Host forum. There are lots of good reviews on a range of good hosts in there.
Not really
I’ve used DreamHost since 2005. I have not had many problems with them. I’ve had none that were not resolved within a timely manner. They use e-mail support for everybody and online chat is available periodically depending on the work load of the support staff. If you want unlimited chat support you would have to pay for their premium support services but its no big deal. The forums they have are helpful for customer to customer support as well and I’m a frequent poster there. I do have promo codes if you’re interested (or you can just search the forum for posts by me as one of them is in my signature).
As far as hostgator I have never used them but I had a friend who I allowed access to my DH account. He never had any problems with it but decided (a few years later…) that maybe he wanted to have his own account somewhere instead of leeching off of me (I never charged him but I had plenty of space and BW – this is before they allowed ‘unlimited’ but w/e). I told him that was fine. He picked hostgator and ran back to me two months later so…
Anyway DH has more advanced options like VPS and dedicated servers once if your business grows beyond anything reasonable for a shared server environment. It also has a healthy one-click installs section for the less web savvy of popular software like wordpress and mediawiki. I think you would like it.
You are going to use the most used and trusted web application. I’m pretty sure 99% linux based web hosts will be bale to support that.
So start the search from web hosting deals section.
There is no best host, there is only the best host for you.
That being said, I’ve had a long and happy hosting experience with Hostgator as well. Lately I’ve been monitoring their service quite closely, and it’s been consistently one of the better performing hosts (among their major competitors): Summary
99% hosts can handle blog hosting. Finding the right one for you should not be a problem, do research and pick a plan you can afford, monthly or yearly. Never pay for more than a year in my opinion.
I would advice to check (i) reputation of the hosting company, (ii) hardware components they are using and (iii) their support resolution time before finalizing a hosting company …
It is very common that serious hosting companies will always use RAID 10 disk array, fast processors, Gigs of RAM and very good internet backbone to provide you super class hosting. They will never overload their servers by hosting thousands of domains (usually they don’t oversell hosting to avoid this). Run away hosting companies will try to compromise on hardware front to cut their cost and to offer cheap solutions. I believe that if you’re hosting on a poor hardware, your website will suffer.
Reputation of a hosting company can be easily available on the internet. Just type “hosting company + reviews” or “hosting company + ratings” … You will get hundreds of sites giving you postive + negative reviews about that hosting company … You can judge their reviews (find out fake and real customer reviews) and decide their reputation online.
Another important factor is support incident resolution time & quality of their work. Check their knowledge-base to see the kind of homework they are doing every day :). Many hosting companies are fast in responding to the trouble tickets, but they lack quality in their work (providing you improper solutions, etc …) … Usually these type of companies don’t pay attention to their knowledge-base, articles, they lack in educating their customers about the recent internet issue, they fail to maintain social relationship (twitter, facebook) with their client and so many other things…
So, when you shortlist any hosting company, simply check for the above points and merit or de-merit them. I am sure that above evaluation can pop-up a very good hosting company for you.
Actually there are lots of them out there… you can even try the big ‘G’ to lists some of you, just don’t forget to get some paper and pencil to write down some good points about that hosting provider. Good Luck!
You can judge their reviews (find out fake and real customer reviews)
While the idea is definitely sound, most of the time, the job is not all that easy. Even well seasoned forum moderators may sometimes fail to notice that something is strange about a review. Reviews on most sites should be taken with a grain of salt, at the very least.
Some such sites don’t actually condone the self promoting practices of hosts (shills), but manning reviews forums can be quite time intensive. That means costs which few website owners are willing to put up with.
Yes, to differentiate reviews is a challenging job … I would suggest to go and check out for the negative reviews instead of positive one …
I would suggest to go and check out for the negative reviews instead of positive one …
True, those are more likely to be from actual customers. I doubt that there are any shills that throw mud at the host they’re paid to promote.
However, unhappy customers can be very biased in their reports, and often willing to forget years of good service for a 2 days downtime that was totally out of any host’s ability to avoid.
Just about every web hosting company can handle your wordpress blog. But to ensure 99.9% uptime and good support i’ll suggest Hostgator and Hawkhost which i currently use.
I prefer to host in a small hosting company. They have less customers resulting to high capacity bandwidth allocation and fast response customer support.
Thanks to all …finally hosted with one…now want to install plugins … as WordPress based…please suggest me some useful plugins to install
A powerful cache plugin should be among the first to add. W3 Total Cache and WP super cache would be two that are popular.
No, Hostgator are not reliable.