I was recently contacted by a reader who was disappointed because they had chosen the same webhost as I did for their blog, assuming that I chose my host because they’re great for blogging and finding themselves bummed when they didn’t get the same performance as my blog has. I chose my webhost (Prohosters) years ago for reasons unrelated to blogging (and now am wishing they had cPanel and Fantastico…) and have a dedicated server which costs me $300 a month (I am self-employed, after all). But this reader chose one of their $25 a month shared solutions and found himself disappointed by the speed (or lack thereof) in which his WordPress powered site loaded. So he asked me, and now I’m passing the question on to you, my faithful readers:

What is the best webhosting company for WordPress bloggers?

I would personally love to hear all of your experiences, positive and negative, so please comment away!!

c|net posted an article yesterday about how Google indavertantly revealed internal projections. Some of this leaked information should be of great importance (and very disturbing) for professional bloggers:

Google said that “AdSense margins will be squeezed in 2006 and beyond.”

It’s not like Google isn’t already making a ton of money from AdSense - the leak also said that:

Google expected ad revenue to grow from “$6 billion this year to $9.5 billion next year.”

So why does Google need to reduce publisher’s earnings even more?? As it is, earnings paid on AdSense clicks are marginal compared to what the advertisers are paying for those clicks (and what’s going in Google’s pockets).

Looks like bloggers need to take a better look at the Yahoo! Publisher Network (which is still in Beta) because Google is apparently planning on screwing AdSense publishers in the upcoming future.

As is often the case whenever there is a free tool available, it gets abused by spammers. Such has been the case with Google’s free Blogger service, and lately they’ve been very active in trying to delete blogs that they view as spam (aka splogs).

Normally I’d say that’s a good thing, but apparently they’ve been a little overzealous in their cleansing of the system and many individuals are reporting that their legitimate, hand crafted Blogger blogs that they spent much time on have been deleted without warning or explanation.

The English Guy has a post entitled Google/Blogger Deleting Real Blogs that I’d highly recommend reading if you’re a current Blogger user or considering using their free service.

A thread at the Blog Party forum suggests that Google is targeting bloggers that have multiple blogs which link to each other. This is a tactic which many legit bloggers do and is a major part of how the whole blogosphere works. It is also a tactic that is used by sploggers. But that in and of itself should not be a reason to go on a search and destroy mission for all bloggers who interlink their sites. The logic in that is faulty - just because a tactic is used by sploggers doesn’t mean that everyone who uses that tactic IS a splogger.

So if you’re using Blogger and you have multiple blogs which you like to link to each other, you might consider porting your posts over to another system, such as TypePad or WordPress.com, before you wake up one day to find your blogs gone and have to go through the nightmare of trying to reach support personel (which has been reported to be very difficult) and proving that your blogs are legitimate.

Consider yourselves warned..

“We’ve just launched Blogger Images. So now you can include photos and images in your posts. Just click the new picture icon and you can upload an image from your computer or from the web. Try it out!”

This is a great step in the right direction for Blogger, as users will now be able to have multiple images within the body of a single post, rather than 1 image per post as was required with Picasa and Hello Bloggerbot.

Still need categories and trackbacks before it is a truly competitive blogging platform – you listening Google?

(BTW, I’m sorry for the lack of posts and updates to this blog as of late. My fiance lost his job last month so I’ve been working my butt off just trying to make my mortgage payments and haven’t been able to give “How to Blog” as much attention as I’d like to or it deserves. Wish us luck with getting our feet back on the ground financially so I can breathe a little easier and get back to writing about How to Blog!)

Bambit has created an excellent layman’s analysis of Blogger vs WordPress, which is a good overview of two of the most popular free blogging tools.

She compares availabilty and demands on the user, setup speed and requirements, pages and pagination, look / feel / templates, interface and user-friendliness, and image handling.

As she pointed out, WordPress does require you to have a webhost that supports MySQL databases and you have to know how to use FTP. However, many hosting companies will actually create the MySQL database for you, in which case I found that doing the actual WordPress install and getting up and blogging takes less than 5 minutes.

Ultimately, Bambit decided to make the switch from Blogger to WordPress (and appears quite please with her decision) - and, even better, has even gone so far as to publish a step-by-step guide to moving from Blogger to WordPress. Thanks Bambit!