WordPress Hosting Made Cheap and Easy

Many serious bloggers and website builders choose WordPress as their software platform. It has the advantages of being versatile and supported by an extensive community of developers for themes and plugins. As a beginner, you can simply use the online version of WordPress to get your feet wet. Eventually, though, you’ll want the flexibility and expansion that comes form hosting WordPress yourself.

Now comes an important decision. Do you want to host WordPress the easy way or the hard way? The hard way is to download the software files and do an installation on your own server or a hosting service you are using now. This is the route IT professionals will go. But what if you are more of a content creator than an IT type? You may be better off just ordering web hosting designed specifically for WordPress.

One good option for those who don’t otherwise have or need a web hosting account is HostGator WordPress Hosting. It starts at under $4 a month and is 100% WordPress compatible. In addition to the low cost, what’s really valuable is the 1-Click WordPress QuickInstall feature. HostGator has built-in an installer specifically for WordPress. You click the button and in less than a minute, you have WordPress installed on your account.

Want to see how quick and easy this is? Watch the WordPress QuickInstall Demo video and see for yourself. From start to finish an actual installation and configuration ready to use takes place in about 3 minutes right before your eyes.

The nice thing about HostGator is that even the least expensive plans give you full blown web hosting and not some hobbled set of resources that you’ll soon outgrow. You get your choice of installing WordPress at the root of your account so that all it does is support your blog, or you can install WordPress in a folder so that it is just part of what you are hosting on the account.

Will you run out of space or get so popular that a flood of fans will crash the site? Not with HostGator. Their WordPress hosting offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Go ahead, become and social media phenomenon and enjoy the rewards of your success. Your site comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7/365 tech support just in case you need help.

HostGator offers 100% WordPress compatible hosting. It easily exceeds WordPress minimum requirements and sports the latest versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP. You’ll be installing the newest stable WordPress version when you click that QuickInstall button. You’ll also have peace of mind knowing that PHP runs as suPHP for increased WordPress security.

Oh, you already have WordPress installed somewhere else or you want to move from the WordPress.com free hosting site? Signup for HostGator and they’ll transfer your current WordPress site for free.

If you are serious about getting into WordPress or are already a user and want to move for better quality hosting or a better price, then you should take a few minutes and watch the video to see how easy it is. Then check out the hosting plans and see how much you can get at such a low cost with HostGator WordPress Hosting. You may also be interested in registering a domain name or in the many other hosting services that are such a great deal from HostGator.

Dotster Eco-Friendly Hosting Commitment

Anyone doing business on the Internet in the last 10 years has heard of Dotster, and the Dotster family of companies including Domain.com. When you think of Dotster, you probably think of domain name registration services. Dotster is also a hosting company offering everything from basic email hosing service for under a dollar a month all the way up to enterprise level website hosting. What I’ll bet you didn’t know is that Dotster is a major player in the realm of eco-friendly hosting.


Eco-Friendly or “green” hosting is growing in popularity among individuals and organizations that want to contribute to a better environment. The conventional wisdom is that green means more expensive when the term is applied to just about anything. That’s not true anymore. You can have Dotster eco-friendly hosting for just $5.75 a month with no long term commitment. Sign up for longer term plans and it gets even cheaper.

Dotster has a multifaceted approach to their eco-friendly hosting initiative. It starts with buying wind energy to power their web hosting servers. What they do is purchase enough renewable energy credits to offset all the power used for their hosting and even more. The commitment is 150% renewable energy offset for all Dotster web hosting servers.

Dotster buys its renewable energy credits from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit organization. The revenues they receive from selling their BEF carbon offsets or renewable energy credits is used to support building new renewable energy projects that include solar, wind and biomass power sources. Socially responsible companies and individuals can both buy these energy credits from various organizations nationwide who fund sustainable energy projects.

Substituting wind energy for coal, natural gas or even nuclear power is a good idea. An even better idea is to find ways to use less energy to get the same job done. Dotster does this by constantly upgrading their hosting infrastructure to improve both reliability and energy efficiency. They buy less power, which reduces the amount they have to charge their customers. Less power means less demand from the grid, so that those new wind generators can handle other loads and further reduce the need for carbon-based energy sources.

This attitude of ecologically responsible behavior is infused throughout the Dotster corporate culture. They donate their used computer equipment to programs for recycling and technology education for the disadvantaged rather than dumping it in a landfill to slowly leach out toxic substances. The office staff is encouraged to reduce printing, use paperless billing, recycle batteries and ditch paper cups in favor of Dotster reusable bottles.

As the icing on the cake, Dotster will plant a tree for you when you become a new Dotster web hosting company. The trees come from Trees for the Future, an organization dedicated to sustainable agroforestry that has already planted 50 million trees worldwide.

If you are on the lookout for web hosting that is more in tune with your personal philosophy as well as reliable, feature rich and an excellent deal, take a closer look at Dotster.com Web Hosting and Domain Name Registration services.

New Phoenix Data Center Offers Colocation Services

Data centers are expanding as the business climate improves and companies pursue productivity increases and lower costs. Many businesses that never gave a second thought to using colocation facilities are taking another look. In the Southwest USA, a good place to consider is the new PAETEC Data Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

PAETEC has just cut the ribbon on their 4,400 square foot Phoenix data center as part of an expansion program that adds to their facilities in Bethlehem and Conshohocken, PA, Andover, MA., Houston, TX and Milwaukee, WI. Why? Customer demand. The role of Information Technology is changing and the “cloud” has a lot to do with it. PAETEC is positioning itself to capitalize on this movement with services that improve business continuity, information safeguarding, network latency reduction and a reduction of management needs.

The idea behind the cloud is one of economy of scale. You can have every company buying servers and racks, putting them in environmentally controlled rooms, providing the electrical power for both equipment and the cooling needed to take away the heat generated by the equipment, and hiring a staff to tend to the data center facilities. Alternatively, you can have a service provider create a much bigger facility and let companies buy their computing and storage services for a fee.

This is what cloud service providers do. They figure out the IT services that are common to many businesses and then provide those as a service themselves. But isn’t that six of one and a half dozen of another? How is the cloud a net saver of anything?

This is where economy of scale comes into play. The cost of operating a cloud services company doesn’t go up linearly with size. You need a certain amount of real estate, electrical power, HVAC, bandwidth and staffing to create a data center of any size. Having twice as many servers, disk drives and network appliances doesn’t necessarily mean you need to double your staff. Yes, you’ll need more floor space, air conditioning, electrical power and backup generation, but it probably won’t cost twice as much. The same is true for bandwidth. It gets cheaper by the Mbps and Gbps when you order big lines compared to little ones. Your staff can also be more specialized, since they are only dealing with a certain range of facilities and a defined set of services.

The contrast is even more dramatic when you compare the startup cost for small companies to create their own IT services compared to simply purchasing what is needed from a company that already has the facilities and expertise. Web site hosting, for instance, has gotten so cheap when purchased from a large hosting service that small businesses are hard pressed to justify buying and running their own servers. Many of them are now finding that offloading their telephone systems to a Hosted PBX service saves investment and staffing.

The colocation center fits somewhere in-between running your own facilities and outsourcing to the cloud. The colo offers the economy of scale for environmentally controlled and secure server space and WAN bandwidth. Yet, you have the option of providing your own equipment that you maintain yourself. Some colocation providers are now offering cloud-like services that include renting servers and storage they already have available and handling maintenance and repair through their 24/7 technical staff.

Should you be going to the cloud or relocating to a colocation facility instead of trying to do it all yourself? It may be time for a quick study to compare the capital and expense costs that you pay now with the monthly fees to get the same services outside. Get complementary support for pricing and availability of cloud and colocation services so you can do a good job.



Note: Photo of Phoenix skyline courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.