Best Cheap Web Hosting

It is inarguably one of the toughest decisions when it comes to choosing the right web hosting for your website. With a myriad of web hosting providers in the industry today, it becomes difficult to select the right one.  A lot of research should be done before you opt for a particular one and also take all factors into consideration. A newcomer is likely to be attracted to a cheaper hosting offering decent plan to suit his/her budget. It is often said that cheap web hosting doesn't deliver the expected performance. But are these cheap web hosting really that bad? Let's find out in this article and decide for ourselves.

Choosing the right web host for your personal or business site is the most important step you need to take for achieving long-term profit. One of the other essential factors is the visibility of your site. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays a vital role in bringing in traffic to your website. If your site's speed and quality is good, it will attract increased traffic. So choosing the right web host will help improve your search engine rankings.

Here are some of the factors you need to check before selecting a cheap web hosting provider for your personal or business website.

Shared Hosting

One of the biggest drawbacks of having a cheap shared hosting plan is sharing your server space with many other websites. You may not even be aware if any of the websites on your server is a spam. It may result in your site too getting spammed. Even if a website on your shared server gets huge amount of traffic, it will end up affecting your site's performance too. So, you need to enquire about the sites on the shared server before you buy the plan. It's also better to ensure beforehand and then make the final choice.

Poor Security

Security is the prime concern when you think of considering a cheap hosting for your site. With internet being vulnerable to hacking activities, you need to check if the web hosting is offering good features in their plans like firewall, anti-virus and anti-malware features, spam protection, SSL security etc. Having such security features in your hosting plan is essential in order to protect your information and data from getting hacked. Always select a web host that will guarantee you proper security application to keep your data safe on your server.

Slow Loading Speed

Well, it's the time when people like everything fast and it gets very irritating if a website takes a long time to load. No one would like to revisit such slow websites. If your website loads slowly then it could lead to loss in your potential traffic.

Slow speed may also affect your SEO ranking badly as Google takes into consideration website loading time also.

Lack of Features

Invest in a web host that offers latest features in their hosting plans and justify how much you pay per month. A good web host should offer features like user-friendly cPanel, drag and drop feature that will help you design your site, in-house caching system to reduce your server load, CDN(Content Delivery Network), compatibility with softwares like WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal etc and also support latest versions of MySQL and PHP.  First you need to be sure what all features suit your requirements and go for a host that meets all your requirements.

Server Downtime

Every hosting company realizes the importance of giving decent uptime. No user would ever like to have a host that gives continuous downtime. A cheap shared host often compromises on the uptime resulting in loss of traffic and conversion on your website.

It is difficult to actually check the uptime that a web host promises, unless you sign up for their plan. Always go for a web hosting provider that ensures 99% of uptime and has well-equipped data centers and servers so that your website performs smoothly. Also, switch to a different host if your website is down more than 10% of the time.

Customer Service

Not all web hosts offer a satisfactory customer service. There are a few hosting providers who do a fantastic job at addressing the customer's issues effectively. Go for a host that offers you 24×7 service and offers different modes of communication so that you can reach out to them when in need. Some web hosts also promise to offer technical support via phone call that is available 24×7 but in reality, they are available only for a specific time.

So as a user you need to confirm first if the web host is fulfilling your requirements and suiting your needs. The support staff needs to be co-operative, helpful, friendly and technically sound then the user may have a problem getting their problems rectified and eventually losing their trust.

Are Cheap Web Hosting Really Bad – Conclusion

These are some of the hosting aspects that one needs to consider before choosing the right hosting partner for your site or blog. Cheap pricing generally attracts the newcomers who have little or no knowledge about hosting and completely rely on their hosting providers for all their hosting needs. Such users are usually fooled by the companies by charging additional amount for extra features that a user wishes to have.

But not all cheap hosting providers are bad.  After a good amount of research, it is found that some web hosting providers like Arvixe, SiteGround, HostGator, BlueHost etc offer a great hosting experience to their users. If you check, their plans, however cheap, do not compromise on the features they offer and also offer great technical support, performance and reliability. And all these hosts offer guaranteed uptime on 99% throughout. If you have any doubts, it's better to go by the user reviews and then go with the one that suits your requirements.

Source: Are Cheap Web Hosting Really Bad?