How to choose a hosting company for your author website

Choosing the right web hosting company for your author website is an important decision. Find out what to look for.

What is hosting?

Hosting is the provision of the technology and services required for your website to be available on the internet. Your website will be hosted on a server, which is essentially a type of computer. Your visitors will put your web address into their browser and will be connected to the server on which your site is hosted.

Before considering hosting, it is wise to decide on a domain name.

Self-hosting

This is the ideal route to go down, especially if you want to monetise your site (make money from it). Self-hosting is when you pay a hosting company to host your website, as opposed to choosing a free platform such as Tumblr or WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress.org).

The self-hosting option gives you far more freedom over your site, as you actually own the site and are not at risk of it suddenly being shut down. You also have more say over your domain name and won’t be stuck with ‘wordpress.com’, for example, at the end of your web address, which can look unprofessional.

If you’re interested to learn more about self-hosting, see Chelsea Clarke’s useful article about self-hosting at herpaperroute.com.

Top five musts for author website hosting

All authors will have individual needs, but there are some basic things to look for in a hosting company’s provision. You’ll need to investigate which hosting company is right for you.

As an author, your top five web needs will look something like this:

• multiple email address provision (so you can have contact@yourdomainname.com, yourname@yourdomainname.com and others)
• WordPress support (if you’re using WordPress to build your site – this is by far the most popular choice for web platform and therefore has the most support available)
• optimised loading speeds (giving your visitors a positive, enjoyable experience)
• FTP access (if you ever need to manually upload files from your computer to your site)
• 24/7 support (if your site goes down on Christmas Day, you’ll need to arrange for it to be fixed as soon as possible)

The best web hosts for your author website

There are many web-hosting companies, some more well-known than others. As the choice and the competition is constantly changing, I won’t name any specific ones here. However, here are a couple of recent articles that do a good job of listing hosting companies for authors, along with their main features:

• Best web hosting for authors – Michael James at webhostingcat.com
• 5 best website hosting services for authors in 2022 – Emir E at growthjargon.com

Who do you host with?

Leave a comment to let us know about your web hosting company, and whether it’s working for you!

Don’t forget, I provide services for web text editing and website proofreading. Get in touch for a chat if you need support.