Fast forward a few years, and it seems like all the good domain names have been taken.  Even a lot of the not so good domain names have been snapped up by domain name speculators in the hopes of striking it rich.  It can make it tough for just a regular guy to get the domain name he wants.  Luckily, more TLD extensions have opened up in the last few years.  .co domain name registration is just one such opportunity for people new to the domain name business to get a start.

Of course once you have your domain name, your going to need to host it somewhere.  Now, web hosting is one such area, that is not as tough for the average webmaster.  If anything, it’s a tough business to be in, but if your looking for good web hosting, then I think you’ll find, that it’s a buyers market.  Web hosting has really come down in price over the years, and could almost be considered a commodity.   I’ve seen good web hosting for anywhere from $25 to $1000 or more per year.  For a new domain with little traffic, it shouldn’t cost much to get started.

If you buy web hosting and a domain name, you can offer a more professional, not to mention unique, experience to your readers. Picking a domain name and registering it is very easy, and many people try to buy the domain name that corresponds to their own name. That’s not so easy these days unless you have a fairly unusual name. However, you can use a little creativity and create an online identity, based entirely around your blog, and the subjects covered in your posts.

With self hosting, you pay a small monthly fee and get to put your blog on a server where you control the subject and editorial rules – within reason. Your hosting company will have rules which bar you from hosting websites on the most unsavory topics or anything that is simply illegal! But within reason, you are not going to have your site or blog deleted because you hate peanut butter, or because you think global warming is a myth. Those are your views and you’re entitled to them. Some of the free providers are more likely to be stricter on which topics they allow. For example, some do not like the whole weight loss category because there is a lot of spam on that subject. This can affect the overall quality of the whole site and lead to everybody else suffering, as the search engines start to block all pages on the site.

Another important aspect of buying web hosting is that often, you can cover your costs by displaying ads on your blog. It is always best to keep these ads relevant to the topic you are discussing, rather than a completely random product. A lot of the free platforms will not let you advertise, and although you might not care about ads, because you are getting the platform for free, you are not really benefitting as your blog looks pretty much the same as everybody else’s. It would be far better to have a blog on a self hosting account that looks fantastic and professional and unique, and pay for it by hosting a few ads. And who knows? Once your blog is established, you might even be able to make a profit from those ads, quit the day job and work as a professional blogger!

Because of all this, webmasters looking really need to be careful with who they choose to host their sites.  Just take a look at this inmotion hosting review, and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about.  There are plenty of good hosts out there, but if you only look at the bottom line price, you may have problems.  As a webmaster with plenty of websites on the go, I can tell you that the only way to know if a web host company is any good, is to actually use them.  Sometimes I’ve paid top dollar for a host that turns out to be a lemon.  And sometimes, I get a host for dirt cheap that turns out to be amazing.  Low cost web hosting can be a very viable alternative.  Don’t let anyone tell you that the only way to get a good host, is to pay premium rates.

Free hosts are great, especially if you are doing short term blogs during a vacation for example. The thing is though, that if you are doing multiple short term blogs per year, I suggest that you look for a paid host where you can have full control and ownership of your content. With the paid blog hosts, it is important to find the best blog host available, to avoid losing your money, and getting poor service for it.

The top hosts online come with 100% customer satisfaction, and even their low under $10 a month price covers unlimited disc space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited add on domains and unlimited subdomains. That way you can keep your personal log on one domain or subdomain, and when you go on a holiday and want to keep people updated on what you are doing, you can use a subdomain or another domain to pass to your friends and relatives.

With those free hosts you will not get much customer service. Web servers are computers just like the one you are reading this post on, and they do crash from time to time. With free hosts this would mean that you might be out of a blog after they are able to recover the server, or you just might have a really long down time. With the best blog hosts available, you will get 24/7 customer service, and 100% uptime guarantee – they will switch to a backup server in case of a crash -  but also you will get daily backups of your account, which means you will not lose the data in case of a hard drive failure. On the top of this you can have the backups sent to your e-mail account and making a double on your own computer – you can never know what happens, and for example in case of a natural disaster you will still have your backups to use.

Now, if your actually a client of the hosting company you have a whole different set of concerns.  While there is bound to be some overlap, the distinction is that certain responsibilities in this process are simply out of your control.  And, that’s a good thing.  That’s why we hire web hosting companies.  But, you will also have concerns regarding your web site that are somewhat similar.  For instance, how will you develop and maintain your website and it’s content.  You may also decide to run a pre existing CMS or blog type software for your site.  This is a different level of responsibility, but one equally important to the success of your site.

These specialty trouble-shooters can help solve most technological emergencies that arise. They can assist with your company’s wired and wireless systems to optimize them for all branches involved. They can help your company utilize the right kind of software to make their systems perform better and reduce risk of virus infection. If the system should become unstable due to a potential virus threat, the IT computer support people can help resolve this problem as well. When working with business security is one of the main points the service needs to keep apprised of.

A professional IT support team will be able to assist in the recovery of data. This is also a common problem when networking with a lot of different types of systems. There can be server overloads which can cause them to crash and result in your company’s loss of valuable information. The experts will teach you and the members of your company how to work with any new systems that might be installed. They will also help with putting together the right kind of components for your business needs.

In addition to providing solutions when problems arise in a system, they can also provide good advice before any problems even exist. The IT computer support team will walk you through the basics of owning and working with computers and their components. They will also advise on when upgrades might be a more efficient way to work and when repairs may need to be performed. They are ready to assist before you get to the point of computer meltdown. Keeping a qualified team of support people for your computer is like having an emergency room technician in your pocket.

There was a certain advantage to working at a university during this time.  It was the early nineties.  The universities and all the collaborative research done my professors was one of the earliest applications to take advantage of the internet.  I was just amazed, that I could find so many other people in newsgroups that were interested in the same kinds of niche things that I was interested in.  I actually found an entire group of people on the news groups, that were big fans of Anne Macaffery and her Dragonriders of Pern series of books.  I had just gotten into reading again, and that was the series I had picked up.  Nobody I knew in real life had any interest in the books, but there was a rabid following online.  My first steps into an early form of social networking via the net had taken place.

Within a few years, I found myself online quite a bit, and even owned my own domain name.  I was as of yet not prepared to handle the web hosting on my own, so I enlisted the services of a gamer enthusiast, that had a server set up to host anyone with a games website for nothing.  The ultimate cheap web hosting deal of the time.  He actually registered the name and everything for me.  At one point, he moved on to other things, and generously transferred the domain name to me.  I still own that domain some ten years later.  For a while, I ran a web server out of my house, with an old PC I was no longer using.  It was a fun learning experience, where I learned lots about web hosting, mail servers and Linux administration in general.  These days, I pay to have my sites hosted, as it’s such a bargain anymore.  What with reseller hosting, seo hosting, VPS, and dedicated servers, there are far too many good choices to bother trying to run my own home server.  Besides, I have other fun techy things to discover these days.

Well, without getting too far off topic, let’s take a lot at what it means to be a green web hosting company. The popular phrase that it all comes down to these days, is lowering your carbon footprint.  The trick with that for a highly power dependent kind of company like web hosting, is to be more selective about where you draw your energy from.  Is your primary source of electricity coal burning plants, or is it wind and solar power?  You can actually use more power, and  have a lower carbon footprint, by being a little more selective in where you spend your hydro dollars. Believe it or not, there are quite a few web hosting companies that are jumping on the green band wagon.

Going the less energy use model is always a good place to start.  Keep in mind, that there is more to a hosting company, then just a bunch of servers spinning away in a server room somewhere.  They are a real business, with accounting departments, personnel departments, and overhead costs.  That includes energy intensive systems such as heating, air conditioning, cleaning, and transportation.  Even if solar and wind may not provide enough power to keep their servers running at peak efficiency, it doesn’t mean they can improve their green ratings by lowering their carbon footprint in their staff offices.  It’s all fair game, and should be considered equally.  Even offering incentives for their employees to car pool or ride their bicycles to work counts.

Another thing to consider, is your business partners.  Are they green?  Is that free logo design site you used thinking about the environment when they work for you?

There are countless ways for any business to be a good partner to the planet.  And it may even be more profitable to go that way.