Blog Hosts
More mind-boggling blog numbers. David Sifry of Technorati says that his company now tracks 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links - those figures have doubled in five months.
It is humbling for a blogger to contemplate that he or she is just one little spec in the ever-expanding blogosphere.
Sifry points out that a number of web-hosting companies are cottoning on to the phenomenon - in the US that is. If you are based in Europe, at least in the UK, it’s not easy to find a friendly neighbourhood host for your blog.
We looked hard for a UK company that offered all the little things that our Wordpress blogging software likes. After a not very good experience with a small but ambitious company, we moved our blog to the US and Bluehost.
Bluehost does all the things a blogger would want - and it is nice to have one-click installation of the latest version of Wordpress not to mention other goodies like PHPSurveyor which we are currently putting to good use with our PR Survey. They also pay good money for referrals, but in case you think this is a piece of advertorial, it is not.
After suffering down-time with our previous company, I naively expected our new host in the Land of Free Enterprise and Silicon Valley to be perfect. Perhaps I was like a starry eyed immigrant just arrived at Ellis Island. But one Monday morning after about a week with Bluehost, the site was down for several hours. I can’t tell you how disillusioned we felt.
Of course, Monday at 9 AM in the UK when everyone is drinking their first desultory Starbucks of the week at their desks is a wee hour of the morning in the US. It’s not a bad time for a host to do some tinkering in the engine room as far as the American audience is concerned. But here in Europe it’s probably the worst time possible. The process of Globalisation is not quite complete as far as blog-hosting goes.
When we’ve experienced an extended period of uninterrupted service, we may join Bluehost’s referral programme and start sending bloggers to them. That way we will earn a few dollars on the side. But not yet.
In the meantime, wake up you European Web-hosting companies! There’s good money to be made out of blogs.
