Recently, I decided to post my CSI fan fic, A Promise to Keep, on Blogger. After I was kicked to other side of the virtual cafeteria by the Cyber-Heathers, I figured that I might want to have a backup plan or place for the story. I obviously wouldn't be posting anymore updates on the Heathers' Wiki site, and, with the way my luck has been going lately, I was scared that the webmaster at FanFiction.net would decide that the costs of maintaining his site are just too much to bear and shut it down. Thus, I moved all 80 plus chapters of A Promise to Keep to gsrfangirl.blogspot.com. As much as I love Blogger, I do realize that it has its limitations. For instance, you can't just add tabs across the top of the page like you can in WordPress. Instead, you have to trick Blogger into letting you do it. As such, it may be a little difficult for me to post a second story on the site, should I ever finish with what I have come to think of as The Neverending GSR Story. Plus, I think that I have read somewhere online that Google can shut down your Blogger site whenever it wants without notice. I don't know if that statement is true or just an Internet urban legend. I would assume that you would have to violate the terms of service in some major way before Google would go to such an extreme. Nevertheless, this rumor--true or false--makes me a little nervous.
One of these days, I'd like to move the story to a site that's a little more fan fic friendly, that is, a site that would allow me to design the template in such a way that I can separate my stories by tabs and maybe even add a forum or chat feature. To do so, I would have to venture into the world of paid hosts, something that I have never done before. From what I can tell, there are a ton of paid hosts out there, which can be confusing to a novice like me. Luckily, there is also a site that helps to clear up some of the confusion, WebHostingGeeks.com.
WebHostingGeeks.com is essentially a web host review site. It takes all the hosts that are out there and sorts them into categories and easy-to-use charts. For instance, the site has just released its 2008 Top 10 list of web hosts, which, in addition to basic information about and links to the hosts' web sites, includes web hosting reviews. Each review contains starred ratings for things like customer support, price, and user friendliness, as well as written opinions by people who have actually used the web hosts.
The site offers other rankings as well. At WebHostingGeeks.com, you can find out what are the best budget, blog, forum, unix, Windows, PHP, email, ecommerce, multi-domain, VPS, dedicated, and reselling hosts. You can also read articles that explain the how-to's and the what-does-that-mean of web hosting. The articles are useful for both rookies and seasoned pros alike.
So for all of you fellow fan fic writers out there who have been thinking about starting your own fan fic site but don't know where to start, I suggest letting WebHostingGeeks.com be your starting point.
