Your first website is a big step. If you’re self-publishing online, whether via a blog or other site, you usually need to cut costs, but at the same time you want the best quality website you can get. Your hosting service matters too, because if they are not reliable, you may lose readers. When shopping for cheap hosting plans don’t forget to compare features like available disk space, and any additional costs for set up or domain name. You also want to know what kind of support they provide. Companies like InMotion, HostMonster and iPage provide highly rated hosting services at cheap rates as long as three to five dollars a month—less is reasonable, if you get a shared account.

You will also need to find someone to do your email hosting for you, since you may end up with far larger number of emails than you had anticipated or can handle yourself. You can chose from individual accounts, business accounts or group accounts. Some features include junk email filters, anti-virus scanning, security, email forwarding and more.

A website like Hosting Observer is ideal because they have done the work of investigating each company’s services and reliability, and they provide side-by-side price comparisons so that you can chose the one that works best for you. They rate services on reliability, control panel interface, and the quality of their customer support. You can read individual user reviews as well as find out pertinent information such as whether the company is a member of the Better Business Bureau or not.

Originally posted on June 1, 2011 @ 4:25 am