When I learned web programming about 15 years ago, I never imagined to buy a web hosting for my website. What I did was looking for a free hosting service to host all of my web creation which were all developed using basic HTML language. I have ever had an account on Geocities before Yahoo shutting it down last year. Geocities was one of the most famous free hosting services available on the net and I think most of geeks who start learning web creation in ’90s know how useful Geocities as part of their learning curve. But the popularity of free hosting service such as Gecocities continue decreasing as blog or web log gaining popularity. People now looking for free blogging services instead of free hosting services.

I used to use free blogging service such as Blogger, but I started to migrate to WordPress platform that allow me to do full customization. Since WordPress requires at least a shared hosting, I started to buy one to build my blog. I know there are free services such as wordpress.com that we can use to start building our new blogs, but if we really want to have full customization we need to install WordPress on a paid hosting. For starters, a shared hosting is more than enough for blogging. We can update it later as our blog gaining popularity and attracts more visitors.

Based on my experience, when a blog reach more or less 2000 visitors per day, the shared hosting can’t handle the load, and usually we can’t access the blog and get some warning. It means the time to upgrade has come. If you have such experience, do not make a mistake like what I did, Do not upgrade your shared hosting to dedicated server directly, but try to upgrade to vps hosting first and save your money.