If your blogs and web hosts are growing beyond your web host – you are not alone. This guide will teach you everything you need to know about choosing and moving to a good web host.

This is installment #1 of JTPratt’s Guide to Webhosting. Follow the link for all installments.

Have you ever heard the phrase “you don’t know what you need until you need it?”. If you are a blogger, a niche site builder, an affiliate marketer, a domainer, an SEO, a web web designer, a web developer or any other type of online web worker – your “working environment” is the web, and your office building is your web host. You may outgrow that office building before you know it and not know how or where to move to expand your business.

It’s not surprising to me that so many people fail in online business, people fail in the brick and mortar business world each and every day. The difference between the two is, online a person can start a “web business” with no money at all (and virtually no risk) – and the only investment you need to make is “time”. There’s no penalty for walking away and abandoning your business either if you haven’t been successful.

In a lot of ways building a business online is still like the old wild west but it’s maturing more each day. When I started on the internet in 1995 there weren’t any classes (and hardly any books) on building web sites. You learned HTML, web graphics, and how to get search engine traffic purely by the seat of your pants. There were no classes or degrees you could get in nearly any kind of web technology. Those of us that trained ourselves were able to command high dollar amounts consulting with and working for small businesses and large corporations.

Nowadays, you can get all kinds of degrees and certificates as a web designer, web developer, and many specialties have emerged like database architect, information modeler, network engineer – you name it. What you don’t see are a series of courses designed to prepare you for building an online business. There aren’t even a lot of real world courses available that apply to working online. If you want to learn to manage a site with WordPress, how to do search engine optimiztion, how social media works, how to build income from multiple affiliates, how to interpret web statistics and trends, how to write good linkbait, or even how web hosting accounts work you are left to scrounge information for yourself from dozens of blogs and forums to piecemeal that information together yourself.

I’ve built and maintained web sites for more than 13 years now, and I even did technical support for and worked at an ISP and webhost in the 90’s for nearly three years – and even I have had a very hard time with web hosts over the last few years. The thing I had a hard time recognizing was when one of my web sites was too big for a web host, when to move it to a bigger account, and who that web host should be. In order to describe to you the process that I went through, first I should explain to you the big business of hosting cheap web sites.

Tomorrow’s post in this guide will be “Cheap Cookie Cutter Webhosting – Good or Bad?”
Read more: JTPratt’s Guide to Webhosting