Eight months ago, I started my blog Life User (http://life-user.blogspot.com). I made almost $10 from AdSense in the first month, and for about three months I managed to come up with an article per week. I met lots of people and gave them my business card, and many of them promised to check out my blog. True, I couldn’t stick to just one theme yet, but I thought I could graduate to that once I had some experience. Plus, I was enjoying the experience of learning to work with Blogger’s layout engine.

But after a few months, the optimism wore off. I ran out of topics to write about, nobody except my mom was visiting regularly, I had very few comments and no trackbacks, and the AdSense income was drying up to less than $0.20 per month. Worse, school was starting to keep me away from the blog.

The only reason I still run the blog at all is that I get an occasional sponsored post on PayPerPost. If I’d gone with a paid host, my failed venture would now be that much more student debt. I’m glad I chose Blogger: I still got to run my own ads, and *only* my own ads, and all I wasted was time.

Antony

I have many sites hosted among an array of services.

My “important” sites are on a virtual server.

I got sucked into the Godaddy machine a while back and pay for a lot of extras that I should be cancelling right now instead of sitting here writing this

I’ve got some free sites out there too.

and since 2003, I’ve had sites off and on at http://www.doteasy.com

Just took a look and I’ve got 5 sites there now. I’m comfortable with what I have hosted there and am confident they are not going away anytime soon.

They are based in Canada and not a bad deal. Their normal price for basic hosting AND domanin registration is $25.00 USD a year. Around every holiday season, they offer a sale. For this Christmas season they are offering the first year for $5.95 USD.

You get your own domain, myownsitenamewhatever.com – website templates, blogs, photo galleries, ftp access, bunch of email accounts, 100MB storage, FREE private registration, decent support, tutorials and pretty much everything a novice or affiliate would need for that fee. Anyone I’ve ever sent there has been happy with them.

Just be careful when you go over there not to go for any of the upsells unless you actually want them. You want what they call the $0 Dollar BASIC Hosting Package.

Your checkout (until 12/31/09 anyway) should be $5.95 USD. A year from now when you renew the package, it will be $25.00 USD of course — no getting around that.

They’ve been decent for me so I feel they deserve a shout.

Happy Holidays!

Antony

Stick with your own account at Hostgator (it’s only $4.99 a month for their starter hosting). I’ve never had any issues at all, and the few times I needed support to do something odd they were very helpful.

I had a free site and it is still up to this day. I hated the banners and pop up ads however but that was my only issue. Then a friend started a hosting company and said he can give me a site for free. He would pay as it made him look good to have clients. I said yes. After a year I wanted to keep it going so he changed me $10 a month. I was fine with that. Any time I had a problem I went to him.

I was on his subdomain. He had his own domain but as him being the host he put me on his subdomain. But he was able to move me to my own domain when I said I wanted more control. NO Problem! It was great! But now I was on my own. Still find. I liked doing things my way. Through doing it on my own I found out that my domain name was through godaddy and that my hosting was with urldownload

But there was a problem with urldownload. They kept going down the winter of 2008 and were down more times than up. urld blamed me but it wasn’t on my end. It was on their end. They kept going down, getting DDos attacked, etc. Then my database got corrupted by them because when they back up the database, they only keep one copy and overwrite it automatically on every back up. So when things were going wrong with their servers, there went my content!

I would have lost EVERYTHING if I had not started to be smart (I was learning as I went along) and backed up my database of my forum at least on my own. The site was recoverable but not my member base or posts. But because I had a back up I gave it to the guy at urld after he finally admit it was on urldownload’s end and I only lost 2 months worth of data.

Now back to the guy who originally put me on his subdomain… That guy was still paying for my domain name even though I was now paying for my own host. I wanted to pay for my domain name and have total control but he just disappeared one day. No where to be found. Cell phone number changed. Email bouncing. No idea. Then my domain name expired. Got ahold of him, he said he was sorry and said he would switch it to my name. Turns out since it was expired it needed to be paid for before transfer. He didn’t talk to me about this but instead paid for a year. But the problem was, he didn’t have enough in his paypal so it bounced. But this was not discovered until after he transferred the domain name account to me and closed off his account. I called up godaddy and they said all they needed was his code and they would transfer it over to me since I knew his name and everything. But he never gave it to me as I couldn’t get ahold of him again so I ended up having to buy a whole new domain again and NO WAY to tell my members what the new address was!

My FREE site with all the pop ups and banners is still up to this day……