Blogger 2 WordPress x 2

I have been using Blogger to host my blog site. I am not an active blogger so it serves me well for the past couple years. Recently, I have re-visited the activities on my blog and found out most of the web traffics hitting my Blackberry tutorial. In addition, it generates a small amount of Adsense income for me.

The small success pushes me to investigate how to improve my blog. Unfortunately, Blogger provides a very limited functionalities and the provided Themes look horrible. I have been tried to search the web to find 3rd party Themes but none of them works well.

I decided to switch over to WordPress, the current most state-of-art blogging system in the blue planet. The most logically move for me is using the free of charge WordPress.com to host my blog. After spending 2 hours to setup my new blog, I figure out I cannot have Adsense ads with my free WordPress blog. Now, I have to figure out a way to host WordPress somewhere else.

[smartads]

I have access to a co-loc, which is hosting some servers for a client, for the past couple years. Since I don’t want to use the servers to host my own blog site, I need to find a machine. However, I don’t have any spare hardware at home and I don’t want to spend a couple hundred bucks on new hardware. Finally, I decide to host my blog site from 3rd party hosting company.

WordPress.org recommends BlueHost, GoDaddy, etc. hosting. I never heard of BlueHost and I don’t like GoDaddy (because I’m pretty sure GoDaddy is not the primary hosting company). After research for a whole night, I end up signing up WestHost as my blog’s hosting company.

WestHost provides a very easy to use management tool and it takes me only a couple minutes to have Apache, PHP5, MySQL, and WordPress installed. I’m paying US$11/month (static IP address) and I have virtually unlimited bandwidth and storage. It’s a pretty nice deal comparing to buying new hardware to put into my existing cage in the co-loc.