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Choosing my first website hosting company was like playing darts for the first time. I did a quick search, looked for something cheap, and signed up. If I remember correctly, deciding my website host took me all of about 5 minutes; I had to wait till the next day for access.

I changed to another website hosting company in less then 2 months; rinse & repeat. After a year of playing ping pong with my websites, and wasting my time, I learned how to do some basic research to try and find a quality website hosting company.

Keep in mind that all the research in the world, all the highest regards, will never give you a guarantee. It will, however, increase your odds of choosing a quality website hosting provider. Quality as in server uptime, customer service, features and pricing. Please note that price is last.

While doing your search for website hosting, please do not make the price your sole priority. If your budget is very tight, and saving every dollar possible is highest on your list, then you may want to consider taking advantage of a free blog hosting solution.

Most website hosting providers provide their customers with a control panel that includes methods to automatically install programs. This allows people with no technical expertise to be able to control their website and install blogs, forums, etc.

One of the first places I recommend looking is at WebHostingTalk.com.  With well over 5 million posts and over 200,000 registered members, WHT has a lot to offer. That being said, remember to look around and doing a search before you ask for advice. Chances are very likely that the answer you want is already there.

Website hosting reviews require that the writer provide verification of the site they have with the company that is being reviewed. You will also find that most people posting there have some time invested in the website hosting provider before they post a review; look for this in their review. Personally, if the person has only been with the hosting company for less then 3 months, I ignore their post.

The forums on WHT are divided into different types of services available. Make sure that when you search or post, you do so in the right forum or sub-forum. You may also want to keep an eye out for special deals in the Web Hosting Offers forum. In fact, if you are on a tight budget, I would recommend starting there for some current offers. Take down the name of companies making offers that you find reasonable and do a search for reviews on them.

Another good place to do some research is at WebHostingReviews.com. Reviews are done via a form asking the person to rate the website hosting provider from 0 to 10, 10 is best, in specific areas:

• uptime & reliability
• server & connection speed
• technical support & knowledge
• customer service & billing
• price value for money
• and an overall rating

Submitted reviews must also contain the domain name (website) that is being hosted with the company the review is about. Reviews also include how long the website has been hosted with the provider, if it is still hosted there and to include the biggest pro and biggest con.

One more source to consider is TopHosts.com. I would recommend starting off by using their Fast Find feature.

In case you simply want my opinion, I have had experience with,and recommend the following website hosting providers:

• AptHost
• BlueHost
• Host9
• HostGator
• LunarPages

WordPress plugins can make your blog do some pretty helpful things. Basically, plugins can extend your WordPress powered blog to do just about anything. Taking advantage of some of these plugins can help you to keep focused on the important things in blogging.

It’s Tuesday, so its time to take a look at Twitter. Each week I will write about trends, tweet tips, Twitter tools, websites/users to keep an eye on, and other Twitter related things. This week I go over a couple of my favorite websites and desktop applications.

There are a lot of way to generate an income with your blog. This is no secret and is certainly something that anyone can do. I will be exploring some great tips and ideas from several successful bloggers on the ways that you can use your blog to make money blogging.

Pownce announced today that it has been acquired by Six Apart and shutting down the service/site on December 15th.

WP recently asked the community to vote on what icon sets would be used for the upcoming user interface for WordPress 2.7. You can read some of the results after the jump.

There are so many successful blogs, and yet, so many more that simply don’t survive their first year. So what is it that will help lift an online project to success? To be perfectly honest, that completely depends on what you call success and what your project is.