Best Cheap Web Hosting

I have used internet just like you have. We have probably been to the same websites and researched for topics the same way. However, since we are different people we interpret things differently. I have noticed over and over that people like to follow the trend, even in the online world. When it comes to choosing the web host I see the same happening here too. People would keep on looking at things that wouldn't really matter much to them. In fact, they wouldn't even notice the absence of these things if they vanished all of a sudden.

Image credit: Ross Merritt @ Flickr

I am talking about web hosting and features that these services offer. If you read a few online articles about website hosting you will be automatically inclined to choose your web host in a certain way. You will look at a huge bandwidth, lots of email addresses, a very powerful server and a hosting plan that makes you different among your competitors. Things don't work that way when you step into the practical world. Today, I am talking about some of the most common things that web hosting companies talk about and tell you the way to choose them in such a way that they would actually matter:

Bandwidth  

Many people don't even understand the idea of bandwidth. When you choose bandwidth you have to look at the number of visitors interacting with your website on a monthly basis. It is because your bandwidth tells you the maximum amount of data that can be transferred from your website to its users in any given second. The data being transferred in a second on your w ebsite at any given moment might be much less than your bandwidth. If you are looking at huge bandwidth when you don't really need it, you are only wasting your money.

VPS Vs. Dedicated Hosting

Many would recommend that if somehow your website is not suitable for shared hosting you should go for dedicated hosting. I will never recommend that for as long as we have virtual private server hosting. This is the type of hosting where you are given a virtual server of your own. This is your server with its resources dedicated to your website. You don't share these resources with any company and enjoy full freedom of installing your favorite operating system, web applications and other softwares and tools that you might want to.

The Disk Space

Yes, they will tell you that you are getting hundreds and thousands of gigabytes of hard disk space. What you have to realize here is that you don't need that much space on the server at all. If your website is a basic w ebsite, you don't need that much of space. In fact, even if you are a big website you won't need that much of space. Such huge spaces are dedicated to websites that have a lot of content that goes on them. Think about university websites that have videos, pictures and PDF course outlines and other documents stored on them.

You can also talk about a website that sells many different types of products and has videos and images uploaded of these products. With basic ecommerce websites you won't need that much space. Even if you are thinking of putting up images and videos, you can work with various tools that convert your images and videos to small formats. This way you don't have to pay for so much space to your website hosting company. Lastly, if your company says you are getting unlimited storage, don't trust these words because it is not possible practically.

Reseller Hosting

It is quite unfortunate that many companies don't look into the opportunity o f using reseller hosting when they can actually offer it. Reseller hosting is when you buy space on a server and then rent this space out to other companies looking for web hosting as well. The amount of resources you rent on the server is more than your requirement. You will never use those resources and so the best option here is to offer them to other companies. Different companies have different packages for reseller hosting i.e. you can earn different commission levels with different companies.

Customer Support

The biggest mistake you can make when you are dealing with a hosting company is missing out on customer support check. You have to know what type of customer support the company is offering. You can find out about the level of customer support offered by the company through online reviews and ratings given by customers. There are many occasions when you need the representatives from the companies to be with you and if they make you wait for a long time, you c ould lose thousands of dollars. Check their response time and different modes through which they are available i.e. phone, email, live chat etc.

99% Up Time

Many web hosting companies will tell you that they have the best servers and so you will not face any downtimes more than 1%. Most website hosting companies like to boast their up time by quoting 99% up time. If you look at this number, it could be quite misleading. 99% up time is not enough for you and you don't want a company that is down by 1%. If we take the example of 100 days, it would mean that your website would be down and unavailable to your visitors for one complete day.

Contracts

Package plans offered by web hosting companies seem quite straight forward. During my research I stumbled upon a few companies that were not that straight forward with their contracts. The package plan you chose seemed quite straight forward but as soon as you agreed to pay you were stuck with a contract. What this meant is that you could not choose another host during the lifetime of the contract without attracting penalties. I would highly recommend you to stay aware of such contracts. Your business can grow and scalability is something you might take advantage of if you keep it in your pointers' list today.