BoostRanks SEO Tips

As far as software goes, it’s hard to beat wordpress at this stage. There’s tons of free themes and plugins to extend its functionality. It’s widely used and there’s plenty of documentation and support for it.

Hosting is a different matter, there’s no clear choice. If you’ve got the inclination to use or learn linux, a linode VPS can’t be beat. It’s cheap, reliable and fast with great support. A popular blog will work best on a dedicated host, so you’ll either need to learn how to administrate it yourself, or hire someone to do it for you. A linode VPS is a good way to wet your feet in learning to administrate.

Shared hosting for one site is the cheapest, but as you add sites, a linode VPS will work out cheaper because you can host a lot of sites on it. As far as shared hosting goes, register your domain and sign up for shared hosting at the same place, it works out cheaper. The only thing I would warn against is godaddy’s terms of service. You can read it for yourself, or google for godaddy horror stories.