Your author website is one of your most critical book marketing assets. It’s where you manage your online reputation, grow your email list, and sell books. Your website is often the first point of contact with the media.
Every website must have a server to host it, but with over 1,000 web hosting options, how do you know what kind of web host you need for your author website?
What is web hosting?
A web host is a company that maintains the computers that serve your website to visitors. These computers are called servers, and maintaining a server requires constant security updates, electricity, bandwidth, and maintenance. When authors ask why they have to pay for web hosting, this is the answer. All that service costs money.
Free Hosting
I don’t recommend authors use free web hosts. Free web hosting is fraught with drawbacks and is the worst kind of web hosting for authors.
- Poor or no customer support
- You are the product being sold to advertisers
- Your visitors are the product being sold to advertisers
Free hosts typically make money by:
- Advertising: You have little control over which ads are displayed on your website.
- Selling Your Data: They track and potentially sell your and your visitors’ data.
- Charging You: Many free hosts are not as free as they first appear.
Don’t use free web hosting, including WordPress.com. People often hear me recommend WordPress and I do. Most authors should use WordPress, but not the wordpress.com version. Use WordPress.org hosted on a real, paid web hosts.
If you’re in a situation where free hosting is your only option, I recommend the following solutions:
- Get a job. The best job for an aspiring author is one in the publishing industry.
- Become the customer, not the product.
Corporate Communism is not the path to prosperity.
Proprietary Hosting
Proprietary hosting is the typical alternative to WordPress.org. The most famous proprietary hosts are
- Wix
- Weebly
- Squarespace
However, proprietary hosts present authors with several problems.
Locked In
If you are unhappy with your hosting and want to move to another service, you have to completely rebuild your website on a new platform. You can’t host a Wix website on Bluehost.
Limitations
With proprietary sites, you have to use the generic solution provided by the proprietary host. Wix can’t run WordPress plugins, which means that if Wix doesn’t have an app for what you want to do, you are out of luck.
New authors have trouble seeing the limitations of proprietary hosting, but as the author’s career progresses, the limitations usually push them off the platform. Successful and established authors don’t usually use sites like Wix or Squarespace. They are more popular with beginning authors.
A Wix website is a bit like a hamster. Most authors had a Wix website at one point. Very few still have a Wix website.
Thomas’s Recommendation
Choose a host that uses the standard WordPress.org software. Most websites run on WordPress.org.
Shared Hosting
The cheapest and most common form of WordPress hosting is shared hosting. Shared hosting is often the best pick for novelists. While a nonfiction blogger might go viral and need more robust hosting, the typical novelist is fine with shared hosting.
It’s important to realize a shared-hosting host is willing to lose money on you at first. It costs them more than $5.00 per month to host a decent website. So, while the introductory price might be low, the price will increase over time as they try to recoup their losses.
I recommend locking in the introductory rate for as long as possible. Bluehost often offers a three-year hosting plan. The introductory price is around $5.00 per month, and the ongoing price is around $15.00 per month.
Shared hosting is the slowest hosting option, but many factors can affect your site speed. If your site seems to be running slow, listen to our episode on How to Speed Up Your Author Website.
Is your web host the source of your website woes?
Some authors complain about one shared host or another, but most of those complaints are due to how the website was set up in the first place and not the hosting. I recommend connecting with a webmaster you can contact on a regular basis who could get you out of technical binds, especially if you built your website yourself. A couple of hours of work by a savvy webmaster can save you years of frustration.
You can find a tech-savvy webmaster on AuthorMedia.social.
But if you are still having issues, remember that shared hosting is the cheapest of the paid options. Don’t expect steak house quality at McDonalds.
WordPress.org allows you to move from host to host without having to rebuild your website, and the process is fairly straightforward. Moving from one web host to another could even save you money as you get to activate the introductory pricing on the new shared host.
If you are happy with your web host, I recommend staying even if leaving would save you a few bucks. Your time is valuable, and moving from one web host to another takes a bit of time and work, especially if you are learning as you go. While switching may be extra work, you’re not locked in as you would be with a proprietary host.
Recommended Shared Hosting Companies
- Bluehost (Affiliate Link)
- Dream Host
Managed/Cloud Web Hosting
I use managed hosting for all my websites. It’s better in every way. Managed hosting can be very expensive, but you get what you pay for when it comes to hosting companies.
You may consider switching to managed hosting if one of the following applies to you:
- You have the potential to go viral
- You’re an established author with lots of traffic to your website.
- You’re a big-time podcaster with robust needs for your website.
I once wrote a blog post that went viral, and it took my website from a few hundred visits to a million visits in the course of three and a half weeks. Because I was with a managed host on WP Engine, my website was just as fast on the day I had 1,000 web visitors as it was on any of the other days. In fact, it may have been faster during the high-traffic days because of all the advanced caching WP Engine performs at various points in the tech stack.
Pros of Managed Web Hosting for Authors
- Scales to Lots of Traffic
- Secure
- Fastest
Cons of Managed Web Hosting for Authors
- More Expensive
- Starts at $20 a month and gets more expensive as your website gets more popular.
Recommended Hosting Companies
Virtual Private Server (VPS) & Dedicated Servers
I don’t recommend this type of hosting for authors. VPS and dedicated servers are useful when you want root access to your server, but an author shouldn’t need root access. If someone recommends a solution or piece of software that requires root access, I don’t use it. That type of solution will be complicated to maintain and expensive in terms of time and labor.
Cons of VPS
- For when you need full root access to the server
- Expensive
- More Complicated
If you have fewer than five employees, avoid VPS and Dedicated Servers. You can run a robust ecommerce website on managed hosting; you don’t need a VPS.
Quick Note on Domain Names
A domain name is something.com, .org, or .social. For example, AuthorMedia.com is a domain that points to our main website, and AuthorMedia.social is a different domain name that points to our social network.
Personally, I like to have my domains registered with a different company than I use for my hosting. It’s more secure. It makes switching web hosts easier since I can easily point the domain at the new host, and it saves me money. The domain registrar I’ve used for years is Namecheap (Affiliate Link). I’ve had over 100 domains with them for almost two decades.
Some web hosts will offer you a free year of domain registration. But when you have to renew the domain, it will be more expensive than if you had registered the domain name at Namecheap.
If you have only one domain, letting your web host double as your domain registrar will make things simpler. It’s one less company to keep track of. But if you have multiple domains like I do, Namecheap has some real advantages.
A Warning!
I can’t stress this enough: Never use a domain name company as a web host. Domain name companies are good at domains; they are not good at hosting. I love Namecheap as a domain registrar, but I would never use them to host my website. Likewise, GoDaddy, the most famous domain registrar, is a terrible web host. I hear more complaints from authors about GoDaddy than I do about Wix!
Bottom Line
You can choose from hundreds of amazing WordPress web hosts. Just because I haven’t recommended a host here doesn’t mean it’s a bad company, but I do suggest you avoid GoDaddy and 1&1. Those two are particularly bad.
Bluehost is perhaps the most popular web host among authors, and I’ve been a happy WP Engine user for over ten years.
If you want more help with your author website, check out my free course.
Want More Help?
How to Build an Amazing Author Website
Learn how to build your own amazing author website, even if you are not a techie person. You will learn how to craft the kind of website your readers will love.
Students who have never built a website discover that by the time they’ve completed this course, their own website is live on the internet. Sometimes, they do it in a single day. The best part? The course is free!
My hope is that you will use my affiliate links, but even if you don’t, the course is yours to keep at no cost to you.
In this course, you will get the following:
- Step-by-step video guide on how to get started with Bluehost
- Step-by-step video guide on how to set up the Divi theme
- Video tour of the WordPress dashboard
- 7 Secrets of Amazing Author Websites
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Related Episodes
To Thomas Umstattd Jr.
I want to know the cost to built an author’s website. This is my first book.
I cannot tell you how helpful this was. I used Wix before and although it “worked” I can confirm it is not something I would use again xD
Thank you Thomas. Your advice is always easy to follow and thorough. I’m not ready for a website yet, but soon. I’ll check back and take some of your courses in the coming year.