Not sure what the “middle man” even is?

In one word: Reseller

There are many people that are reselling web hosting and domain names. Many times they are not easy to spot when you are looking for a cheap company to buy from.

First you need to do some research.

If you are on a website and they keep pushing a hosting service then once you open their hosting company leave the site open and do more searches on affordable hosting.

Do a side-by-side comparison of the prices. Not only of the hosting services they offer but also check out:

1. How much is it to purchase their domain name?

2. What does it cost to buy a domain name for a longer term (2-3 years)

3. How much is it to renew the name?

4. How much does it cost to buy private registration?

5. How long has the company been around?

6. What is the cost of their website builder? Even though you may not be using this service, you are just looking to see how their prices compare.

7. Check out their uptime. If you are going to all this time and effort of creating a site, you want to make sure that your site will be seen 99% of the time. Yes, all web hosting companies may be down for maintenance and unforeseen circumstances, but if your site is down more than it is online then you will be losing time and money.

8. Are other customers happy with them?

If you are purchasing a website builder or a website-in-a-box, many times you MUST use a certain hosting company. Sure the website might be free, but you may be paying 2 or 3 times the cost of hosting for a year. So how “free” is the website?

If you are buying auto insurance or even house insurance, you will price compare, same goes for your hosting.

One way to possibly spot a reseller is the way their home page looks. Many of the hosting companies that are resellers have a template that looks much like the main company’s page.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the reselling of domain names and hosting, but I have seen quite a few “hosting companies” that are gouging their clients with prices.

If people would just do a little research, they could save themselves possible hundreds of dollars a year.

So take a little time to research for your webhosting. There are many great and affordable plans to fit almost any budget out there.

One company I do like is GoDaddy.com. They have very affordable (some may say cheap) hosting plans for under US$5.00 a month and if you purchase a hosting plan from them you can get a domain name for US$1.99, which makes it more of a great deal.

Save money = Cut out the “middle man” on your webhosting and domain name needs.

You can use wordpress.org to make money on your blog, but you need to have a paid hosting service.

You can get a basic hosting plan at GoDaddy.com for about $4.29 a month (or cheaper for 12, 24 or 36 month plan). Unless your blog is HUGE, start out with a basic plan and upgrade when you are ready. You could even cover the cost using Google adsense and other advertising on your hosted blog.

I had a difficult time finding a tutorial on moving the blog. I knew it couldn’t be that difficult. So after piecing together the steps, I decided to create my own tutorial on how to move your free blog (wordpress.com) to a hosting plan.

Since I already owned the domain name of uponmainstreet.com (that was also my blog name), I checked into the domain mapping process that is available through wordpress.com. But after researching in forums on wordpress, I found out that wordpress.com still controlled my blog (it is a redirect to your domain name), and I still would not have the control over the blog that I wanted to.

No, it is not difficult to do, but to make it easier reading, I broke the instructions down into 3 steps.

Here is step 1 – Moving your wordpress.com blog to paid hosting

The other 2 steps are in the same location.

If your web hosting company is on the ball, you can have everything at your new “home” up and running within 24-48 hours (if not sooner).

Once you have moved everything to your paid webhosting, you will be able to use all the plugins and create the blog the way to want.