We love blogging. We love the WordPress blog platform.

We are not enamored by most blog hosts.

If you want to run a WordPress blog with your own domain name (which we suggest) then you’ll need to find a good website host. But it’s a hyper-competitive business, website hosting is. To cut costs most hosting companies skimp on service and reduce their reliability standards. Hosting companies generally get away with this (for a few months, anyway) because most customers make their choice of host by looking at the price and nothing else.

Do not be one of those customers. The difference between a low and high quality host is the difference between your WordPress blog being down a few minutes per month and being down hours (or days!); it is the difference being able to talk to hosting company technician on the phone and being relegated to seeking help through maddening online chat system.

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Our travel blog, like all of Spot Cool Stuff, runs on WordPress. Over the months we’ve downloaded and activated many dozens of WordPress plugins. And then deactivating almost all of them. Most plugins are too buggy, too time consuming, and/or too unimportant to bother with.

There are, however, five plugins that we think any WordPress travel blogger should seriously consider using. Each works with WP version 2.7 and 2.8.

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