My sister D’s been curious about what I spend all my time on the internet for. So I explained the whole blogging thing and forums and showed her a few of my sites. She was curious in it and asked me how much it cost (she balked at the idea of having to pay for hosting – she’d previously had a small site on a freeserver that was free due to the ads that the hosting company placed on her site). But I explained to her that I got a lot more space than a freeserver allowed, as well as bandwidth and there was no limit to the number of files that I could upload (unlike some freehosting websites, that have a limit of 50 or 100 files per account).

I don’t generally share too much with my sisters, maybe because I do occasionally write about them (albeit, keeping with first letters of their names only!), but she was appreciative that I took the time to explain things to her about blogging and coding and such. She went to the library later to borrow some books about blogging and how to make basic websites. And while I recommended the companies that I do business with – my hosting company and the companies that I have purchased domain names through, I also suggested that she check out reviews of hosting companies. After all, I’m only 1 person and there are countless of companies online that I have never used or heard of or only know a little bit about them based on their reputation.

The nice thing about website hosting review sites is that they’ll often have testimonials and people will mention how long they’ve been with a certain company and their likes and dislikes about a lot of different factors – such as uptime and speed of technical support. It’s always helpful to get some opinions from everyday users like yourself when you’re wanting to try out a new company. It helps to find out what kind of issues that other people have had with them and it’s a good idea to find a review site so you can sample testimonials from a lot of different companies all at once. Webhostinggeeks.com seems to do a good job of that, as you can look up companies based on your requirements – like companies that’ll provide a free domain name or companies that are great for people who have a very strict budget for their website.