The reason is pretty simple, you don’t want to get stuck with a host that would suspend your site for 500 visitors in an hour. And moreover, moving from a bad host to a good host will not only affect your site in terms of downtime but will also impact your search engine traffic. These are the top 2 reasons why should go for a good reliable host. I have learnt this hard way and feel obligated to pass these learning to my fellow bloggers.

Now let’s take a look at the models avaialble when it comes to hosting.

1) Blogging platform host: Sites like blogger and wordpress offer you a platform to run your blog. They are ok if you have no clue about programming and managing sites and can never be serious blogging platforms.

2) Free Hosts: These are the web hosts who offer free hosting supported by ads. That means they’ll run some ads on your site and make money. Because of the restrictions they have on how you manage your sites I never tried my hands on any of them and if you were to ask me they are an absolute NO!

3) Shared hosting: Now we are getting a little serious. These are the web hosting services that charge you based on various parameters and there are unlimited number of them out there. I’d say if you want to just start off with blogging and see how it works, this is the best web hosting solution for you. My serious advice before you chose a shared web hosting service is to read their TOS (Terms of service) and try to understand on what grounds they can suspend your site. A good shared host could cost you $7-12 per month.

Another advice I can offer is that don’t fall for a cheap host who is exaggerating about the unlimited bandwidth and storage space with unlimited domain hosting. Trust me they are not worth your money, effort and your patience. My BAD EXPERIENCE with

1)    Support Services: This is one of the most important things which will have an impact on you application sooner or later. Do check for the existing support tickets and see the replies from the hosting service. Open a few random tickets and see how quickly the issues were resolved.

This will tell you a lot about the companies support system.

2)    Check for network latency of the web hosting company. This is very important as it will have a direct impact on the pages are served and your sites performance. Click here (PingPlotter)  to download a small software which shows the network latency and graphs.

Following are the best Hosting Services offering Rails support.

Hosting Rails (http://www.hostingrails.com) (My Pick #1 for Shared Rails Hosting)
Lot of gems are available on HostingRails server to be installed. If you don’t see a Rail Gem you want to install on the list, No Problem! Hosting Rails are happy to install it for you as long as it is listed on RubyForge.com and has no performance issues.

Offers good tutorials (http://www.hostingrails.com/tutorials) and has a huge repository of FAQ’s and Tickets which are available for our references.

Hosting Rails not only offer one of the best services in the industry but also best prices on their hosting plans. Shared hosting plans start from $2.88/Month to $15.99/Month

Dream Host: (http://www.dreamhost.com)
DreamHost is a known name in the hosting industry and stands as one of the best hosting services today (I am sure thousands of you will agree with that).

It offers plans under $10 if purchased the account for a year. It also offers very good online support, however, charges extra for limited phone support per month.

DreamHost  is currently running a discount offer on their hosting plans

    * To get the setup fee waived use the promo code "NoSetupFee"
    * To get the $50 discount use the promo code "Promo50"

DreamHost offers a huge list of Installed Gems on their servers. Click here (http://rails.dreamhosters.com/) to view the list of Gems on Dreamhost.

EngineYard (http://engineyard.com) (My #1 Pick for Dedicated Rails Hosting)
This is one of the most expensive services which offer exclusive Rails support. If its got anything to do with Rails and you need it then this service never says a NO, but there is no such things as free lunch.

All the additional applications come for a price tag.  Click here (http://engineyard.com/customers) to see what their customers have to say about them.

EngineYard offers best support and services for Rails. Click here (http://engineyard.com/whatyouget.html) to see what do you get with a plan.

Rails Machine (http://railsmachine.com/)
One of the best services you will find on the net. These are professionals and take their business and clients business seriously. RailsMachine offers high end services and solutions in terms of hardware and support and also charges handsomely.

(Dedicated Servers) Services start from $75/month + $30 setup to $325/month + $30 setup. This is the best plan if you can afford an expensive plan and looking for dedicated servers.

A2Hosting (http://www.a2hosting.com)
I am not very much familiar with the A2Hosting (excuse my ignorance), however, on papers A2Hosting looks like a good hosting company which offers excellent shared hosting plans and offers ruby support as well.

Pricing starts from $3.95 to $17.95 for a year long plan and it also offers a 30 Day money back guarantee.

I am pushing this hosting service down the list as I noticed high latency (at least in India).

I hope this helps anyone who is planning to purchase hosting for Rails Or if you know a better one please leave comments.

I have divided the process of setting up a website for free in 3 stages which are as follows:

1. Register a Domain Name for Free or Almost Nothing!
2. Free Webhosting for your domain
3. Keep your free website up and running in style (Design and Maintain)

Without wasting much time and writing just for the heck of it lets proceed to the first of the three steps. Register a Domain Name for Free or Almost Nothing!

This is the last post which completes the cycle of creating, uploading and maintaining a website for free. Let’s quickly cover the designing part and move on to the maintenance part later.

The first on the list is Wordpress, it is one of the most powerful webpackages available on the internet today. Almost 65% of the blogs and personal sites are running on wordpress today. Wordpress is a complete package with lets you update, edit and maintain your web content.  1000’s of plug-ins and templates are available on the internet for wordpress to enhance and add more functionality to the sites running on wordpress. If you ask me, I would say word press is the best choice.

Following is the list of sites which offer website templates for free.
Wordpress
Google Page Creator: Google Pages do not offer website templates for downloads but it offers functionality where you can design the website and later publish it to the FTP address.
http://www.freelayouts.com/
http://andreasviklund.com/
http://in terspire.com/
http://oswd.org/
http://coffeecup.com/
http://easyfreetempl ates.com/
http://entheosweb.com/

We are done with the designing part, lets move on to the maintenance. As I said, Wordpress is a powerful and complete package for the webmasters. There is infinite number of plug-ins available for wordpress to enhance its functionality which makes it my all time favorite.

Once your site is up and running you might want to track the traffic on your site. This article covers a free product called Google Analytics and will help you Setup and run it for free.

Once you have the content ready for your website, where will it be hosted for the users to access it? Luckily we are living in a world where webspace is cheaper than the space on your hard-disk. You can buy up to 100GB space online for only $90 a year which comes down to $ 7.5 a month, which is really cheap. (Godaddy)

Getting back to the topic of "Setting up a website for free" here are a few reliable and reasonable options for hosting.
Godaddy offers about 100MB free space to host your files but you will have to live with the advertisements which automatically appear on the site, but this 100 MB space comes with the domain name bought from Godaddy.

Another good option is Awardspace.com (Does not work in Asia); it provides you with everything you need to host your website. The catch with Awardspace.com is that it works only in selective countries.

Following is the list of sites which offer free web space for users around the world:
http://110mb.com/
http://doteasy.com/(Without Banners)
http://122mb.com/
http://50megs.com/ (With Banners)
http://0catch.com/ (100 Megs)

So what do you do once you have a registered domain name with let’s say Godaddy.com and free hosting with Doteasy.com? Login in to Godaddy.com and modify and add Doteasy.com Name server information to the domain on Godaddy.com and you are all set!

Until a couple of years ago tracking website traffic was nothing more than a fancy counter on the sidebar or at the bottom of the page. The counter didn’t show much other than day’s/weeks/months traffic in different time slots.

A lot has changed over a period of time. Keep aside professional webmasters, even amateur bloggers want to know every detail about their blog traffic.

There are a lot of software’s and web services out there which offer website traffic statistics. Today I am going to talk about the most sophisticated and easiest of all the website traffic monitoring software’s out there.

Millions of webmasters have moved on from the authentic softwares to the services offered by Google.  Analytics also formerly known as Urchin is one of the website traffic monitoring service offered by Google. This service is absolutely free of cost and offers extensive website traffic statistics.

    Get Google Analytics up and running in 3 easy Steps!

Step 1: Sign-in to Google Analytics – Google Account is required to use Analytics services. If you don’t have a Google Account, leave a comment with a valid e-mail address and I will send you one.  Click here to sign-in(Click on the image to enlarge)

Step 2: Signup for a Analytics account (Click on the Image to enlarge)

Fill in your personal information (Click on the image to enlarge)

Step 3: Copy the Tracking code (Click on the image to enlarge)

Copy the code and add it to your blog or the website.