Setting up your own blog has become so much simpler since the first web logs started to appear back in 1992 we are going to focus on hosting your blog with a web host as this is the only way to have full control over your URL and full control over the design of your blog.
There are so many blogging clients available such as wordpress and typepad, I started off with wordpress as it is free the most simple to get started with, and the most popular and hence the best supported so I will focus on them.
If you are looking to set up a blog you will probably have a pretty good idea about your subject matter, if not – take time to think about what content you are going to display, as good content is the most effective way of attracting visitors to your blog.
Next you need to decide upon a web host, all blogging software uses a database to populate your blog, this form of content management is what makes blogs so easy to maintain as the information (posts) are drawn from the database and then passed to a template for display – this achieves a nice uniform feel for your blog and requires absolutely no knowledge of web design (unless you want to – but that’s a post for another day).
Because of the database driven nature of blogging, choose a host which offers a MySQL database with access to it via the control panel, good examples in the UK are FastHosts, 1and1 and JustHost. In the USA JustHost again and HostGator provide a great service.
Once your hosting plan is up and running, you need to go to wordpress.org and down load the latest stable version of their blogging software, they offer a famous 5 minute installation guide, which involves unzipping the package, entering your database details, password and host server into the file called wp-config.php and then uploading the files within the wordpress folder to the location on your server where you would like your visitors to go – note if you just upload the folder, your blogs adrdress will become www.myweblog.com/wordpress as opposed to www.myweblog.com.
Once uploaded you can now log on to configure your blog, choose a password and write your first post, change the templates and add/remove widgets – there are thousands of free templates to choose from that enable you to customize the look and feel of your blog, many of these templates can be further customized to display your company logo and other information.
Popular blogs are the ones that are most regularly updated, so keep good content flowing to your blog cultivate a few links to your blog from others and watch your popularity increase.
Webhosting is an industry which has really boomed over the last few years, it is possible to find cheap webhosting which will provide you with everything you need now for under £5 per month.
So why has webhosting become so cheap?
Well, webhosting companies face huge competition, it is relatively simple to set up a webhosting company since all you need is a server, with sufficient storage space and a good internet connection. Another reason that webhosting has become so cheap of late is the fact that technology prices and therefore storage and data transfer prices have also become much cheaper – these savings are then passed on the the webhosting customer resulting in much cheaper webhosting.
So how do know good webhosting from bad webhosting?
Well, good webhosting will feature the following key components.
Good 24/7 support - from webhosting technicians, that way any problems you have can be easily dealt with even if they happen at midnight, enabling you to keep your business running.
A 99.9% or higher up time – if your webhosting goes down you are loosing money.
Good connectivity (bandwidth) - enabling fast downloads for your customer, it is well documented that most internet surfers are impatient, and a slow site will repel visitors.
A good webhosting graphical user interface (control panel) - this enables you to manage your web site, domains, email, databases and all other features in addition to viewing statistics relevant to your site such as number of visitors and the domains from where they were referred
At Which Domain Host all of our featured webhosting companies meet these key criteria, this enables you to concentrate on the more personal webhosting choices you will make such as:
Storage Space - When choosing a web host you should see how much space your web files take up on your computer before deciding upon a package, taking into consideration the fact that as the business grows so too will the web site. 
Bandwidth - Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data transfer that visitors to your web site can achieve each month measured in gigabytes.
If you choose a package with an inadequate amount of bandwidth, your webhosting provider may charge you to access more.
E-mail Accounts - Along with your hosted domain you will also be provided with a number of customizable e-mail addresses, how many you need will depend on your requirements and should be thought out before entering into a webhosting contract.
Shared Webhosting - This the most likely way your will host your first website, your web site will be hosted on a sever which is shared by many other sites. Shared web hosting offers an extremely cost effective solution for hosting a home or small business website, but may be too restrictive for a larger business who wish to use large amounts of storage, bandwidth and customized software.
Dedicated Server Webhosting - This option gives you much more flexibility to grow your business. A dedicated server can host as many sites as you choose, and you have the added advantage that your bandwidth will not be compromised by web users accessing other site as only yours is on the server. Dedicated hosting also provides you with added security as only you have administrative access to the server, and you are free to add your own virus protection software and operating systems.
In the most simple of terms an analogy using water flowing through pipes gives the easiest explanation of bandwidth, the wider the pipes (i.e. higher bandwidth) the more water can be moved per second (or data).
So Bandwidth is the amount of data passage per second and is generally measured in Gbps (Gigabits per second).
It is easy to confuse bandwidth, i.e the speed of your connection with data transfer allowance, which is the amount of data that can be transferred too and from your server or web site per month and is measured in Gb. Most web hosts actually incorrectly use the term bandwidth in place of data transfer allowance, and it is important when choosing a web host, or a web hosting plan that you have a rough idea of the amount data transfer you will require.
Put simply each time somebody looks at a page from your site they download that page from your server, using up some of your data transfer allowance, if your average page size is 100kb and each of your 100 visitors a day looks at say 4 pages then per day you are using 40Mb which equates to a data transfer of 1.2Gb per month. Unfortunately customers visiting your site are not the only ones to use up your data transfer, sending and receiving email, uploading new pages to your server, and believe it or not GoogleBot, MSN Bot and the Yahoo! Robot to name but a few of the countless spiders out there, all use up a portion of your data transfer depending on how many of your pages they spider. Infact the various web spiders out there can use up a significant amount of your data transfer especially when it is in it’s infancy as they attempt to categorise it for production in organic search results sometimes spidering your web site up to 10 times a day. It is possible to tell these spiders not to crawl your site, not to crawl specific pages or not to follow specific links but that is beyond the scope of this discussion, and generally they are your friends because it is these spiders which will get you listed in the major search engines and ultimately drive customers to your site.
So, the more bandwidth/data transfer the better?  Yes, decide how many visitors you ideally would like/can cope with and then choose a package with twice the bandwidth you think you need, this serves two purposes, firstly and most importantly it allows you room to grow. Secondly having more bandwidth than you need means you are ready for any surges in popularity you may enjoy, and will avoid having to pay any excess data transfer charges (usually around $2/£1 per Gb).
When choosing a web host or a web hosting plan, one of the many factors you must consider is how much disk space you require, over the years the cost of memory and the physical size of that memory has fallen. Just look at the capacity of the new IPod when compared to the PCs of old and you will get the picture. The knock on effect of this on you is that the cost of web hosting has fallen dramatically over the last few years and consequently you can get a lot of disk space for a few pounds a month. 
So, how do you decide just how much disk space you need?
Well one of the main factors will be the size of your site, and how you expect it to grow over the course of your contract with your web host. This web site for instance takes up approximately 80Mb of disk space, and is growing at a rate of about 5Mb per month, as newer content is added to the main site and to our blog, which is hosted on the same server and contributes to our disk space usage, as will any of your subdomains. 80Mb sounds quite small, and you would be right in thinking that since most basic web hosting plans offer at least 1Gb of storage, and some offer an awful lot more. But you must also factor in your Email accounts, the number of which will eat up you disk space allowance, and you also need to consider whether you will be uploading media files to your server be they audio, video, documents or programs you wish to make available for download to your customers.
The bottom line is do you have enough to grow?
For instance do you envisage adding a pod cast to your site, a great marketing strategy, but one which will see your disk space usage rocket. When deciding on storage for your web hosting plan take a look at where you want your business to be in 2 years time and choose a deal which can cope with the expansion you require to get to that point and beyond. Conversely chose a hosting provider which will allow you to upgrade and add on additional disk space, bandwidth etc so that you only pay for these feature as it becomes necessary, the key is to think ahead and not get caught out with not enough space to upload your latest product range.
You will have noticed by now that most web hosting companies off you either Unix (or Linux) Hosting, Windows Hosting or both ‚Äì to some this is an unexpected decision to have to make, many unless they own a Mac will be largely unaware of the capabilities of any other platform than Windows. So what are the differences between the two systems and what are the advantages of each?
The first point to note is that you do not need Windows Hosting just because you have a Windows based PC, nor do you need Unix if you own a Mac, the HTML code or Java Script you upload onto the server is universal as is the server’s output of that code, so your website will look the same on either. The difference lies in the software which is used to output that website.
Unix Hosting Unix Hosting uses a Unix based operating system which was developed primarily for use on severs, Unix Hosting is generally cheaper than Windows because most web hosts use Linux - a Free Open Source version of Unix (which is used in some supercomputers) and consequently do not have to shell out thousands of pounds in licensing and support to Microsoft, a saving which is passed on to you the user. Another advantage of using free open source software is that anyone can make changes and improvements to the source code, and in doing so add functionality and updates without contravening any license, this factor has lead to Unix based systems naturally evolving over the years to become relatively bug-free. As a result Unix based operating systems are renowned for their inherent stability and their ability to run for years before a reboot is required, thus requiring less attention from technicians and reducing costs – an attractive feature for a server.
Windows Hosting Windows Hosting as the name suggests uses MS Windows as an operating system and although more expensive and slightly less stable does have some benefits over it’s Unix based conterpart. Primarily this has to do with what you want to host; if you want to use an MS Access database or upload MediaPlayer files such as music or Videos you will require Windows Hosting, (N.B. MP3, Quicktime, Shockwave, Flash and Real can be handled by either system).
Decisions, decisions Making the decision as to which is best thus comes down to what you want to do with your web space. Both Systems can host Multimedia both can host dynamic content and with PHP, MySQL and CGI, but the question becomes, do you need to run Windows based applications on your server? If so then you have no choice but to use a Windows Hosting solution, if the answer is no then can make your decision based on other factors such as choice of host, cost and reliability.
