The next step if you choose to run your blog using standalone blog platforms or remote hosting options is selecting the appropriate hosting package to support the platform.

This article doesn’t apply to those who simply want a hosted blog platform. If you fall into this category, feel free to read or skip this post.

With the myriad of hosting services and packages out there, it is easy to get into troubles if you carelessly choose the wrong hosting company, or even the wrong hosting plan that the company offers.

If you are just starting out, perhaps shared hosting is something you should go for. It is amazing the kind of service you get for a low monthly fee. Beware though, a bad host could mean endless nightmares for you and your blog. Price doesn’t necessary show the quality of service. Even hosting that costs less than $10 could vary from bad to excellent.

Here are 8 steps to minimize your bad experience with a hosting company and make starting and running your own blog as pleasant as possible:

1. Look around
Ask around. Browse forums and resource sites. Get the feel of what hosting companies offer and charge in the industry. Don’t judge anything yet. The biggest and brightest is not always the best.

Hosting directories are great places to start, but some of them “sell” the top ten places for hosting services to bid for. It is a dirty practice, so it is important that you didn’t base your decision on that rating and ranking alone.

2. Know what you need
Everyone has different needs. This is when, like I told you in the first point, you should never assume that the biggest and brightest is the best.

Often, you will never use all the space and bandwidth promised. You can have a successful blog without owning a busy one.

Blog software is small. Image files are moderate to huge in size, depend on the quality. If you provide a lot of images or software for free download, you want to keep this requirement in mind.

Next is what features you need. To run WordPress, you need PHP support with MySQL database. MovableType requires Perl. Most hosts provide the features, but just in case they don’t, you want to know it before you buy.

Small footprint of a blogware doesn’t mean they require minimal processor resources. When your blog attracts more traffic later, you will find that it continually exceeds the limitation sets by the company. So, take this into account too.

3. Know the rate
The rate for shared hosting as of this writing is $5-$10 per month for multiple domain hosting. For better service, expect to pay $10-$20 per month.

Your mission is not to get the best band for your buck. Far from that, it is time to think in terms of priorities, how reliability is important to you. Do you need extra features that you will never use but in return you get an aggregrate of 2 days of downtime each and every month?

4. Research deeper and find other opinions
Find hosting forum and search for what they have already been talking about hosting companies. Dig through the archives to see what others have reviewed about them after using them for a few months, a year or more.

Again, don’t trust hosting review sites. You want to find as much people saying good things about a hosting company before it makes to your short list. At least take second and third opinions to backup the reviews.

5. Make a short list
Make a short list of hosting companies that have received solid and positive reviews. A few negative reviews are acceptable. No company will ever make everyone happy.

The decision is not final yet, but this time make yourself a list of 3-5 companies you think are great.

6. Test the support response time
Now is the time to visit the hosting site, one by one. Look into what they offer and see if they match the requirement you have at hand.

If they provide live support — they usually are — then test to see how they treat a prospective customer. See if they can answer some questions you still have.

Popular hosting companies have their own forum where their customers and support staff hang out and help others solving their problems or ask questions before the sales. Make use of that resource.

7. Research and monitor the host
My first hosting is a nightmare. I paid one full year and end up moving to another host, including a brand new domain, because downtime was a major problem. The free domain that was registered through them is almost impossible to bring with me because of the responsiveness of the support.

Other tools you might want to try:

• If the host is popular, you can check and see how stable they are, the uptime of their servers, and other information through Netcraft.
• Alexa offers tracking of site popularity among those who install their toolbars — it is popular, since they are owned by Amazon.
• Check the response time of one or more of the sites hosted by the company using Vertain’s website speed test. See how it compares to others. Note: You are limited to only three free speed tests per URL per day.

8. Search for integrity
Finally, my little advice is that you should always go for companies who do business with integrity. They usually don’t over-promise and under-deliver.

For instance, 2 terabytes of bandwidth transfer per month cost much more than they charge. Although most sites won’t ever reach that, chances are the hosting service will disable accounts for domains which are consuming a quarter of the promised bandwidth or disk space.

I know hosting providers who follow the crowd but really have great services though, so it really depends on a lot of research and discussion with others who experience it directly.

Generally, 20GB of bandwidth is a lot for a blog which consists of text content most of the time. With that amount of bandwidth, you can serve more than 60,000 pages per month, with the assumption of 30K per page.