Most Malaysian bloggers have known the importance of hosting own domain. Hosting own domain can give you the:
- Security of all your recorded sweet memories. You don’t have to worry if your blog in blogspot.com or wordpress.com been deleted for abusing their terms & conditions (that you probably don’t know what there are).
- Ample space of online storing. This absolutely important if you have family members across various part of the globe. The last thing you want to happen is limited number of picture you can upload to share with your family members as your kids grow!
- Ability to brand your blog/website as professional source, look & feel. It’s easier to remember mysuperkids.net than mysuperkids.blogspot.com or mysuperkids.wordpress.com. Hosting your own wordpress blog can also give you the freedom of installing hosted widgets.
Although the benefits of hosting your own blog are obvious, choosing the right hosting company can be tricky. After all, the last thing you want to happen to your website or blog is SERVER DOWN.
Therefore, choosing the right hosting that comes with the right support is so critical, especially if you are new in hosting and knew nothing about IT stuff. And deciding which hosting companies to go (Malaysian hosting or overseas) can easily make you confused.
These are some of the advantages of Malaysian hosting:
- Faster loading time. Actually, not really fast. I compared blogs hosted in US with other blogs that used Malaysian hosting company and the loading difference is not significant; less than 1ms.
- Easy payment. You can use online banking to transfer the money to local hosting companies. Just remember that you are not protected by any third party should you have dispute with the merchant. E.g. tak puas hati and want your money back.
- Use local language. This especially true if you have difficulties understanding English language.
I myself used US based hosting for all my websites and blogs. So far, I have no problem hosting with Hostgator (2 years now). Upon my observation, these are what you’ll get from most overseas hosting companies:
- High tech server. You can get less server downtime and fast loading time with these superb servers.
- Highly reliable. Overseas hosting has been in the business for more than 5 years. They can leverage from their past experience to avoid the same shortcomings in the future. Therefore, they are familiar with common server problems and most importantly, they aware of what to expect before the problems occur.
- 24/7 support. The fact that they don’t have so many public holidays (like Malaysian do) and have standby employee to handle any shortcomings on the weekend makes you feel comfortable. You can ask whatever problems to them and you’ll find most answers straight to the point in less than 48 hours (normally within 24 hours).
- They are professionals in handling customer service, not just marketing/business people who bought cheap server and sell the space and bandwidth on his backyard. There is once when I have problems with ionCube in installing script to the server, luckily the support team willing to look into it and install it on my behalf.
- Your payment is protected by third party payment solution. I love to use Paypal as my intermediaries than paying direct to my credit card. Whenever I have problem or late response, I’ll just raise the issue to ‘resolution center’ for Paypal investigation. This normally happen for my other online purchases. So far, I won all my cases, yes!
- They are customer-centric & profit driven organization. They know making recurring income from existing user is much easier than getting new customer. Therefore, they’ll keep their customer as happy as possible. Hosting business faced stiffed completion in overseas market, positioning their company as the most trusted & reliable brand is crucial.
- Cheaper domain name. In Malaysia, you’ll be charged around RM50-RM80 per domain name (e.g. .com, .net or .org). However, you can get the same domain for less than RM35. The best avenue to buy domain is Namecheap.com because you can also get privacy protection for free!
Despite all the advantages listed above, overseas hosting can be deemed as expensive to Malaysian bloggers. You get for what you pay I guess. But if you are running serious business from your websites/blogs, consider established international hosting before you opt for cheaper version in local company.
Don’t risk being one of those “penny wise, pound foolish”.
For that, I’m planning to launch “Mommy Hosting” meant for mommy blogger who wants overseas hosting quality but for local price. If the demand is viable, I might be subscribing to their dedicated server for you to enjoy unprecedented blogging experience.
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