Our website AskDanAndJennifer.com is a very popular Love & Sex advice column, web show, and support community, now touching literally millions of lives every month.

When one of our advice articles recently hit the #1 spot on the Netscape.com homepage, the traffic to our site skyrocketed. We got over 30,000 visitors that day. Wow!

Amazingly, our $7/month HostGator web hosting account held its own and we had no downtime!

Downtime would have been very expensive, as we brought in about $500 in passive blog revenue that day.

A word of warning

While trying to improve conversions, better monetize a site, etc, it’s easy to go a little overboard adding new software, WordPress plugins, and so on to your site. In short, you can shoot yourself in the foot and break your own site – like we recently did. Oops. It was expensive too.

Not long after this first incident above, we had another article featured on Netscape.com, and our site went down HARD. That day would have brought us 40,000 visitors, and we missed out on most of it.

Why? Well, we installed a very system intensive software package called OpenAds to track all our ad clicks. What we didn’t realize at the time is that the way we had configured OpenAds basically added the equivalent of 20 visitors for EACH real visitor. So it was like having 800,000 visitors that day instead of 40,000. Yeah, point gun at own foot and shoot. Repeat.

To their credit, the HostGator staff did quickly move us to a semi-dedicated server so we could handle that load, but we missed out on that really great prime-time traffic spike that morning.

We have since decided to move our primary site to a more powerful virtual dedicated system to handle our the increasing traffic levels and our experimentation with bizarre and often unpredictable software packages and WordPress plugins.

Are there other good web hosting options?

Sure, there are web hosting companies that provide great good, solid service and reliable servers. But there’s a catch (read on, we’ll spill the beans below).

When we first started looking for a good web host a few years ago, we asked around and got a general shoulder shrug from most of our friends. Yeah, they all had one host or another that was “OK”, but nobody could tell us”the best one to go with”. So after a LOT of painstaking research, we ended up with a “short list” of possible contenders.

These are “the web hosts to choose from” that we actually recommend to our friends and family, but unless you’re starting out with a huge budget, we recommend you get started with the first one…

• HostGator – Best web host to start out with, and stay with until your traffic starts to REALLY grow. They reliable, have very quick support, and are very inexpensive: as low as $5/month. And they do something no other solid but low-cost web host offers: you can sign up today month by month, no commitments.
• ServInt – Great high-end web host, and priced accordingly: starting at $50/month. Solid, reliable, and very knowledgeable support staff. This is the must-have web host if your website is consistently getting over 200,000 page views/month.

We started with HostGator and stayed very happy customers with them until our traffic started to really grow, and we passed 200,000 page views/month. At that time we moved to ServInt, and while our web hosting bill is now over $200/month, it’s well worth it.

If you’re just starting out – or you’re looking to keep your costs as low as possible while working with a solid, reliable web host, do yourself a favor and get started with HostGator like we did.

HostGator is great because it JUST WORKS, they offer a lot of great features, and you can just sign up for an inexpensive monthly plan, month by month – no long term commitments.

In fact, HostGator is currently running a special promotion: less than $7/month – with no long-term commitments, or $5/month for a longer term. You just can’t beat that for a solid, reliable web host when you’re starting out.

Web and blog hosting decisions

Handling 30,000 visitors to our WordPress blog in a single day was not bad for a $7/month hosting account. We were pretty darn impressed. And that’s why we recommend HostGator to our friends and family regularly.

In short, if you want a hosting provider that is inexpensive and JUST WORKS, and you’re bringing in less than $1,000/month then we recommend you go with HostGator. That’s what we did, and that’s where we send our friends.

Can YOUR web host handle 30,000 visitors in a day? You can actually start your very own web hosting account with HostGator today for under $5/month.

Still not sure? Get this: another thing we like about HostGator is that you can actually try them out at no risk to you. They offer a 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee… so they really make it easy for you to try it out and see how it actually works for you. If you don’t like it, they’ll give you a full refund, no questions asked. We think that’s pretty cool.

So go ahead… Try HostGator for yourself. You’ll be glad you did. Then let us know what YOU think.