Technicalities of hosting an art blog

I just found out one of the art blogs I'm following is running on an estimated budget of $5000. That's a large number to me.

Hosting an art blog doesn't have to be that expensive.

For comparison, Parka Blogs' hosting fees runs up to USD $10.50 per month. That's a combination of hosting cost from bluehost.com which includes the domain name and domain privacy protection, and a Flickr Pro account which costs $22.50 when you sign up for two years at a time.

Free hosting

There are lots of great and free blogging services to choose from. The most popular ones are

• Google Blogger (E.g. Peter de Seve)
• Wordpress (E.g. Danny Gregory)
• Tumblr (E.g. Drawn)

I actually started the blog using Google Blogger at parkablogs.blogspot.com. The reason I switched was because back then, Blogger didn't have that summary preview feature. As a result, each post with multiple pictures will take a lot of scrolling. And multiple posts on the homepage means even more scrolling. Not only that, it's also loading pictures that readers did not choose to load.

If you're not sure of how long you're going to last, I recommend choosing free hosting first.

I would recommend Google Blogger because the parent company is Google and because that's the one I have experience with. One great feature with Blogger is, if you want to switch platform in the future, they have an export function that allows you to download the database of your site. With that database, you can port it other to other platforms, like Wordpress for example.

One thing to note about Wordpress. There's the free blogging platform from Wordpress.COM and there's the free blogging software from Wordpress.ORG. The former has everything set up for you while the latter, you have to install it on your server space yourself.

The common point for both is you can blog as easily as writing an email.

As for the number of pictures you can host, right now, Blogger is offering a free 1GB storage with additional capacity that you can buy. That 1GB, provided by Picasaweb, is shared among all your Google account. That's not a lot of storage. I won't recommend buying additional capacity from Picasaweb because they charge a fixed fee for a limited capacity.

Even with free hosting, you can choose to pay for your own domain name. It's as cheap as $10 per year and you can get yourname.com instead of yourname.blogspot.com. For example, Urban Sketchers run on Blogger.

Paid hosting

The advantage of paid hosting is you can host whatever (almost) you want. In particular, you can tweak the programming code to give you extra features that doesn't come with free hosting.

For paid hosting, you'll have to do a bit more work.

First, you have to find a webhosting company. Many have plans that cost under $10 per month and you can get unlimited storage (as per their terms). I'm using Bluehost and it's $6.95 per month. On average, I'm using 7GB of bandwidth per day which translate to 7000 pageviews with each webpage about 1MB. Once in a while there will be downtime but it's not too often thankfully. I don't think any webhosting company can guarantee 100% uptime.

The second step involves installing a blogger software onto the server space you just bought. There are several blogging software to choose from, namely Wordpress, , Drupal, etc.

Wordpress is probably the simplest and most popular blogging software to use for paid hosting.

If you're not technical, choose a webhosting company that provides quick installation of blogs. It's should be on the list of features that go with the other features like bandwidth, capacity, etc. They make installation as easy as a few mouse clicks.

Picture hosting

You should host photos on your own site. That way you have control over them. You can choose to backup whenever you like. When you switch servers in the future, it's easily to transfer all the files.

Another option is to use Google's PicasaWeb or Google+ for hosting. They offer free hosting for images smaller than 2048 by 2048 pixels.

For general usage, just go with the capacity offered by your paid hosting.

Blogging doesn't have to be expensive

Blogging is the cheapest and, if you do it right, effective way to market yourself and your work.

As laid out above, it doesn't have to be expensive. I highly recommend free hosting first just to get a feel of blogging, and because it's easy to move to paid hosting later on.

I hope I covered the important points. Feel free to ask questions.