An increasing number of people all over the world are taking advantage of blogs for a personal interest as well as for online businesses. Much of the increased popularity is thanks to WordPress hosting – blog platform making it easy to setup and manage professional blogs. Regardless of what you are going to use the blog for, you obviously want it to perform as good as possible.

So, how do you find the best blog hosting provider and what do you have to take into consideration when choosing one? What Are the Options?

When surfing the web in search for the best possible blog hosting provider, you can make it easier for you narrowing down the options into three different categories. These categories are web hosting providers, exclusive blog hosting providers, and web hosting resellers. What is the best alternative for you and your blog depends on your needs. Both web hosting providers and exclusive blog hosting providers offer free and paid services.

If you are a beginner when it comes to creating a blog, or issues such as working with HTML, you probably want to be looking for a blog hosting provider that offers easy to setup blogs. With this said, if you want to be able to customize your blog and be in total control – pick a blog hosting provider that is offering unlimited features and allowing you to stay on top of things. Blog hosting providers have an advantage over web hosting providers in that they make it easier for bloggers to get exposure. This is thanks to the automatic encoding that is included in the service of the top ranked blog hosting providers.

WordPress hosting providers are not limited to just hosting a blog by the way, you can have a regular website too. So if you want to blog in order to make money or just run a blog and do not have any technical skills then pick a blog hosting provider.

If you are quite Internet savvy and want to build the blog from scratch – choose a regular web hosting provider.

The Various Blog Platforms

WordPress is one of the best blog platforms, and it undeniably is the biggest and most popular, but there are several other great and popular blog platforms on the market. Mentioning them all would be impossible but here the other platforms: BlogEngine.NET (of course), Blogger, Nucleus, TypePad and Vox. All these platforms offer ease of usability but limitations exist. Blogger for example, does not allow for changes to the permalink of a post while WordPress.com does. A more social blog is Vox, though the downside to that is you must be a registered user to leave a comment on a post. Either way, it's up to you as a blogger to pick; if all your friends are on Typepad, do that.

Finally, if you decided to work through WordPress and are now thinking about how to install it I highly recommend installing it with the help of Fantastico. You can find Fantastico in your website's cPanel account – it is an easy one-click process. A regular web hosting account may not have the one-click installation for WordPress or Fantastico. Be sure to check then the hosting provider's options when choosing a plan. If there is no easy one-click, you will have to download and install all the directories manually.

At the end of the day, go with the easiest option for you. New bloggers should consider going with a blog hosting provider while people who can work through cPanel may opt for a regular hosting account. Either way, going with a WordPress.org account rather than WordPress.com account will offer you many more options and control over your blog.

Thanks to Eva and the folks over at web hosting search for providing some information on blog hosting.