Today, to continue the discussion on website hosting, I am pleased to have a guest blog post by  Tiffany Dow.  Over to Tiffany:

A website hosting service is a service that handles storage and ability to connect to your website. You’re basically renting a place to store your website. You can have a domain name but you can’t put anything on the site.

You can’t have an operational website without hosting. For businesses, that means nothing can be promoted or sold – no one will be aware that the business exists except in name only.

Business owners aren’t the only ones that need (and benefit from) having a website. Writers can use sites to build a platform and promote their work. Writers are creative people. Shouldn’t they stick just to writing? Not if they have dreams of getting their writing into the hands of an audience.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a ‘big’ writer and don’t have the goal of hitting the New York Times best-selling author chart, you still need a site. If you have writing talent, the gift of gab or even the desire to write, then that means that there’s something creative within you that’s dying to be let out and shared with others.

Words are so powerful – they have the potential to move people emotionally, to make them stop and think – they have the power to change lives for the better. Let’s say that you have a lot of poetry you’ve written over the years, but you’re having trouble finding a market for your work – a site of your own can help you achieve that goal.

Poetry is an extremely difficult field to break into. Though there are contests, small ezine sites and even a few literary magazines that accept poetry, the acceptances are few and far between and the pay tends to be on the lower end of the pay scale.

You can put up poetry on your own site or publish it yourself and sell it on your site. To do that, you need a website hosting service to store the files you’ve created to house your poetry work.

If you have a story to tell and you love writing fiction but you don’t like the length of time it takes for traditional publishing companies to act (sometimes it can take a publishing company six months or longer to get back to a writer), then you can upload files to your website and share them with the world.

Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) your work is protected – once a creative work is created, you automatically own the copyright, so you don’t have to worry about someone getting away with using your work illegally.

You can write fiction eBooks, upload them to your site and you’re automatically a published author. As an added bonus, you get to keep 100% of all the profits – no sharing with an agent or having to ‘earn out’ cash advances before you start seeing steady income from the book. You can also put up excerpts of your work – which gives viewers a preview and makes them want to read the rest so they buy the book.

Maybe you’re a writer but you’re more into writing non-fiction than fiction. You would still need a website hosting service to get your work online on your own site as well. Many bloggers don’t realize that some blogging companies can freely take whatever is written on their site and use it without compensation – or delete it on a whim without warning.

So anything you have that has the potential to make money for you, you want that stored on your own site. You can take your blog posts, put them in an eBook and sell them on your own website – especially if you’re an expert in a topic and you’ve been blogging about it for free. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t benefit from the knowledge you share.

Let’s say that by now, you know what niche you want and you have picked out some keywords. Now it is time to start your blog. This usually means buying a domain name and then hosting for it. A domain name will cost about $10 for a .com and hosting will cost anything from $4 upwards.

If you haven’t got any money to spare, you’re not obliged to buy a domain name of your own. You can use a free blogging platform such as Blogger. Don’t use Wordpress.com because they don’t like advertising/marketing. It is against their Terms of Service to publish affiliate links and your links will be disabled. Many Blogger blogs are high ranking money makers.

But think about it this way –using a free blog is like renting a house whereas having your own domain name is like owning your own home. When you rent somewhere, you have to get permission to do anything to it like decorating or changing the bathroom. You pay the rent to the landlord and you can be expelled at any time.

When you own your own home, you can make all the changes you like to it. You are in charge. Your own home is an investment and eventually becomes an asset.

In the same way that the landlord has control over your rented place, so the folks at Blogger have control over your blog. They can shut it down at any time (and they do) and that will be the end of your hard work. I’ll leave it with you. Perhaps you could practise on a free blog and buy your own domain later.

For registering a domain name, two of the most popular companies seem to be GoDaddy and NameCheap. I recommend that you buy a .com as this is good for SEO reasons. Google likes .coms and they sound professional. They are more expensive. The .infos are usually much cheaper, but they do not rank well.

It is important to choose a domain name that has your main keyword phrase in the URL, for example: www.ghostwritingbysarah.com. If that domain name is taken (it is), you need to adapt it. Play around with it. For instance, you can add a word or you can use hyphens between some of the words. However, Google doesn’t seem to like hyphened domain names so much.

Now you need hosting. Godaddy and Namecheap also offer hosting services. Two other hosting companies that are popular are Hostgator and Host4Profit.  Hostgator is probably the easiest to use and you can have multiple domain names on one account. It is also less expensive and uses cpanel. Host4Profit is different, but when you need support they always answer rapidly. I started with Host4Profit when I first began working online, as part of a plugin profit package and course. This blog is hosted there.

Whatever domain name provider and hosting company you choose, your blog will soon be up and running. Just follow the guides given to you by your service providers.