Bloggers find a host looking for business

Net Results: One of the major transformations in the past year on the internet hosting front is the swathe of new low-cost offerings partly aimed at people who keep weblogs, or "blogs".

Until recently, if you wanted a blog and were just starting out, you tended either to opt for one of the free online services (such as blogger.com or livejournal.com) or you went for an independent service that rolled hosting into the overall subscription price (typepad.com or radio.userland.com).

You could also buy your own domain name and purchase a hosting contract of some sort and arrange to install your own blogging software and maintain it (movabletype.com, wordpress.com), but most people wouldn't even think about taking that plunge unless they had some technical acumen and were fairly sure they'd be blogging for the long haul.

In other words, you didn't start hunting down hosting services until you were either fairly self-confident or perhaps, naively over-confident.

If you were setting things up yourself, basic hosting services a year ago tended to average out at about €70-€100 a year, depending on what you wanted out of it.

This week, I was surprised to discover just how many hosting providers in Ireland and abroad do basic packages at only about €3-€4 a month. These would all allow someone to host a small personal or business site at negligible cost, getting services that a few years back were more the realm of the business or techie customer.

In Ireland, you can find such offerings from hosting services such as Blacknight.ie, Openhosting.ie, Letshost.ie or Hostingireland.ie (and the prize for successfully avoiding the word "host" in your company name goes to Blacknight).

These small packages are ideal for new bloggers, as they won't break the bank but will give you a lot more flexibility and independence than the free services. With your own domain name, you can have your own e-mail address, as well, rather than using one connected to an internet service provider like Esat or Eircom.

However, one hosting service is offering something that is the deal to beat all deals if you want to dabble in blogging and see if it's for you, but also get all the trimmings of having a fully-fledged hosting account.

Hosting365.com, the largest of the Irish hosting services, will give anyone 100 mb of hosting space, a blogging set-up that uses the open-source blog program WordPress, and all the background bits and bobs (eg a database) needed to make a weblog work. That's all for free. And the deal includes access to support round the clock. The offer is open to anyone in the EU or the US. The catch? Really, only that the company reserves the right to see how this all goes for a year and may then decide to start charging for the service. The cost would be at the very low end, unlikely to go above the €3.75 that Hosting365 already charges for bargain basement web hosting without the explicit blog element.

But by then, they're hoping you'll think it's all such a great idea that you'll be ready to upgrade to more server space and services. So much so that managing director Stephen McCarron says they've set up a simple one-click system to transfer the free blogs into paying accounts.

They're also hoping that bloggers - who by their very definition are those prone to comment, recommend, and spread news by word of mouth - will like what they see regarding service and products. "Of course, what we want to do is impress the customer, and we see bloggers as an influential community," says McCarron. "The idea is to get them in and impress them. Our goal is to attract both individuals and businesses." While businesses cannot use the blogs to create a business - they are intended to be non-commercial - businesses are encouraged to create a corporate blogs as a way of communicating.

Hosting365 has its own company blog in which, for example, it explains more about the free blog offer: http://tinyurl.com/grylr.

McCarron says Hosting365 is generally hoping to attract the newbie blogger who is on one of the free services. "But this is a step up the ladder and gives them all the bells and whistles" of a paid-for account, he says. WordPress - which was partly developed in Ireland - comes with one basic "skin", or template for appearance, but bloggers are free to download any of the many skins available online.

"We aren't imposing any banner ads or logos on the blogs either," he says. Until the company gauges the rate of take-up, it is restricting registrations to EU and US users, but it will be assessing the situation, he says.

I don't know of any place else, anywhere, that is offering something quite like this. If you are thinking of starting a blog, this is a great way to dip your toe and see if it suits.

klillington@irish-times.ie

http://weblog.techno-culture.com