Which web hosting service should Nigerian bloggers use?

Posted by Felix Okoli on Tuesday December 17, 2013 at 16:9:0:

When it comes to blogging, it is a relatively growing profession in Nigeria and now, I can honestly say that there is a growing number of Nigerian bloggers who actually make a full time living on just blogging alone.

For most newbie bloggers, there seems to be a sudden rush to just stick with blogging platforms that offer free web hosting for bloggers and one of them is blogger. However, as a blog grows bigger, there may become the need to migrate to a paid hosting plan since stories of entire blogs being deleted on free hosting platforms for things such as going against terms of service can arise.

Yeah, there is a growing category of people who use free web hosting for their blogs, but I would say, it's not a sound long term plan.

Most blogs in Nigeria tend to run on Wordpress platforms and these are normally hosted on paid hosting plans which charge an annual fee for their service. Some web hosts allow Nigerian bloggers to pay n Naira while some which are foreign only accept Visa or Mastercard online payments.

I've used quite a number of web hosting companies and might I say, it's best to use the one that actually offers you an efficient service such as good uptime and effective customer support.

For a blogger who's just using a single blog on a web host, it's ok to start with a simple hosting plan and stick with it if you are only going to use that blog. If you are however a niche blogger like myself, I prefer going for shared hosting plans.

Why do I go for shared hosting plans? Well, Initially, I used to pay for web hosting fees for every website or blog that I created but after a while I discovered that I was actually losing money since not all niche blogs I set up were successful in the long term. As a person who runs many websites, I've discovered that shared hosting has saved me a lot of money since I'll only have to pay for a single plan and be able to host multiple websites.

The good thing about using a shared hosting plan for your blog is that you can easily start up new websites and by the time they grow, you can decide if they'll need to get a separate web hosting service for themselves. It doesn't make sense to pay for multiple web hosting plans for multiple websites that have just about 50 pages of content each when shared hosting can allow you to host them in one place.

Anyway, you shouldn't go for a shared hosting plan if your blog has actually grown a lot and has a lot of traffic.