Cloud Hosting Blog

Every day our support department receives a lot of inquiries from our customers through our email support and 24×7 live chat regarding our hosting products and services. Two-thirds of them have no experience in web hosting and more than half of it wants to start their own blogs for leisure and online venture.

From the lengthy list of frequently asked questions, we picked the most relevant, provided them our answers, and properly organized them to simulate a usual customer support scenario. It assembled a step-by-step approach on how to begin a blogging quest with us.

Basically, you’re already a step ahead with THC – our hosting plans are optimized for blogging that suits perfectly your blogging needs. Here are the things you need to know to start your blog site right away:

Q: What name should I give to my website?

A: In most cases, customers decide on what to call their own blog sites. However, quite a number of users asked for our advice on how to come up with a “good” name.

So what’s a “good” site name? A good, strategically chosen name enjoys the benefit of improved traffic and better search engine placement. Yet the most important thing about naming a site is branding.

From the opinions of our hosting and SEO experts, a good site name has the following attributes:

• Anyone in the world can read and understand the site name (well, at least, most people).
• It gives idea what the site is all about.
• It is easy to remember.
• It is hard to misspell.

Q: Is a site name and a domain name the same?

A: No! A domain name and a site name are two different things. A domain name is your Web address while site name is the name you give to identify your site.

If you want to check the availability of a proposed domain name, you can use our domain search utility.

Q: Which blog type should I build?

A: If you’re new to blogging, you may want to create a personal blog for a start. This will give you an opportunity to learn about the blogging environment and pick up some needed skills. You’ll realize the importance of social communities and online bookmarking as important keys in publicizing your blog.

For experienced bloggers who are eager to seriously monetize their blogs as soon as possible, a niche blog might make a better choice. Niche sites have greater potential to generate revenue because of their targeted market. To create a niche blog, select the market segment or area of personal interest that is appropriate to your goal or vision. If you like or sell computers and gadgets, for instance, your blog posts will be focused rather narrowly at these topics.

Q: What blog platform should I use?

A: In my opinion WordPress is the undisputed blogging platform for both beginners and advanced bloggers. It is a free, customizable blog content management system that boasts a plethora of themes and useful plugins. These enhance not only the functionality of your blog, but extend features as well. Some of these plugins even make the blog more search engine friendly, while other blogging platforms make SEO difficult if not impossible. WordPress is by far the most advanced and feature filled blogging editor available on the Web.

Like any of our EasyApp applications, WordPress can easily be installed through our H-Sphere control panel. However, we understand that you may encounter problems sometimes, so if you do – our live support staff is just a few clicks away and eager to assist you until you confidently see that your blog is up and running.

Q: Is there any alternative to the WordPress platform?

A: Yes, if WordPress is not your preference, b2evolution is a good alternative blog engine.

Q: Should I edit locally or upload by FTP?

A: In the case of websites that do not use a content management system, do all editing locally and then upload via FTP. WordPress is a content management system for blogs. Websites should use Joomla.

Q: Do you have any content management software that I can use if needs arise?

A: If you need content management software (CMS) to manage your media assets, then you can browse through our extensive EasyApp application library. There you will find various ready-to-install CMS such as Joomla, e107, and Mambo. You can also find image gallery systems such as Gallery 2 and Coppermine Photo Gallery, for database storage of your pictures and images.

If you wish to use third party tools you cannot find in our EasyApp collection, you can install it by yourself and seek assistance from our technical staff, but we cannot guarantee full support in this scenario.

Q: Where can I find and download plugins and themes for my WordPress blogs?

A: You can download various plugins for WordPress here. Please read and follow the installation instructions of your downloaded plugins. We advise that you don’t install more than fifteen (15) plugins to your WordPress as these may consume too much resource on our servers and may affect other shared hosting users.

If want custom themes too, WordPress presents a rich themes library website called “Theme Viewer” where you can browse and download themes for free. In theme viewer, you will see two to four-column themes, of various layouts formats, styles and colors. Choose the one that fits your blog’s personality and style, download it and then upload it to your domain. If you seriously aim for monetizing a blog, we recommend any three-column or four-column theme. This will provide advantageous space for your ads.

Q: I want to use a blog editor. Is there a blog editor which is handy for my purpose?

A: There are two types of blog editors you can find – online and desktop. Most bloggers prefer to use online editors because they are fast and they save time in publishing posts to the actual blog. If you are using Firefox, you can try searching for extensions for blogging editors and tools that work seamlessly with this browser.

There are also free offline blog editors available. If you don’t know any, Google can help you, and you may use any of them if you like. However, we don’t completely support them – though still, we try our best to assist you to make them work. If you have Wordprocessing program – oh well – you can definitely use it to write your article offline and then “copy and paste” to your blog if you feel that you are ready to publish it.