Someone recently asked me to write an article about the Best Hosting For Freelance Writers. It’s a great suggestion. There is only one problem, I’m not really qualified to write that article due to lack of experience with more than a couple of them. I will, however, relay that experience here, and also point out other webhosting that has been recommended by sources I trust. Just keep in mind that except for these first three, I have no personal experience with any of them.
Web Hosting Services I Have Personally Used
- Yahoo Small Business Hosting – Do NOT use Yahoo hosting. Period. End of discussion. There are literally dozens of things that average ordinary websites do, and almost every webmaster does once they learn a little bit. You can’t do half of them on Yahoo Hosting. You can’t edit your .htaccess file. You can’t use default mysql or php scripts. There are standard things that you can use, but you can’t use them the standard way, you have to use one of their tools. Oh, and don’t even think of putting a WordPress blog there. Google Yahoo Hosting and WordPress if you don’t believe me. Nightmare. I think they still offer WordPress 2.2 which not only is so far out of date there are virtually no plug-ins for it anymore, it is also unsecure because it’s missing literally hundreds of fixes. DO NOT USE YAHOO HOSTING. Ok, moving on.
- Dreamhost – Google around and you’ll find lots of mixed opinions about Dreamhost. I, personally, have never had a problem, and they always have what I need, even if I didn’t know about it when I signed up. The have one click installs and upgrades for WordPress, so they are perfect for that. You can change your DNS settings with ease and you can add domains to your same hosting account, so if you want to buy two more domains, you just buy the two names (from them or someone else) and then just add them to your account at no extra charge. (You have to pay for the names, but nothing extra for hosting.)
- 1and1.com – I have never hosted anything with 1and1.com. They had a sale when I needed a bunch of domain names, so I used them to buy them, and I’ve bought more from them since. No troubles, but I haven’t really asked them to do anything either. One odd thing has come up. 1and1 automatically renews your domain names, which is fine, except that they renew them for one year and there is no way for you to change that. I emailed customer service and they said that I would have to email the billing department. That seems like pretty basic functionality. Also, I have always registered my names the same way, so maybe there is another way, but as far as I know you can only register one name at a time. That is sometimes fine, but it is a hassle if you want to register whatever.com, whatever.org, whatever.info and so on, or some misspellings either.
Here are some affiliate links. They gave a discount or something last time I looked, but no guarantees.
Up Next –> Webhosting that comes recommended from sources I trust…(tomorrow)