Cheap hosting became super popular in the web market as it offers affordable services for small and medium-sized businesses and projects. Naturally, all people want to save money and to get high quality services at the same time.

But is it really possible and maybe cheap hosting can do more harm than good to your online project?

If you are newcomer in the online business, cheap hosting will be good start for you and will help you to explore the inside of the web hosting services.

Reliability and Cost

In fact, the reliability of web provider is much more important than cost of the hosting plan. As there are a lot of fly-by-night cheap hosting companies, you should be careful when choosing a provider for your future website.

As some companies use outdated servers that have regular crashes, you may have permanent downtime and can lose many visitors. Some cheap host can be very slow that will have negative impact on your site’s reputation.

There are some companies that economize on customer support or don’t have it at all. So, choose only those providers which guarantee high quality customer support that you can contact any time.

Naturally, cheap cost can’t imply five star quality service, but it is possible to find cheap hosting provider which will offer you necessary resources and support on a level.

How To Choose Reliable Cheap Hosting Company

There are several aspects that you should take into account when choosing cheap hosting provider. As we’ve discussed above, your task is to choose a host with 100% uptime guarantee. Although in most cases this index can be decreased, you can choose reliable hosting provider promising 99.8%.

Choose the host allowing you to upgrade if you need more disk space and bandwidth. You should also take into consideration the cost of upgrading.

Be careful when provider will offer you additional services and tools as you can overpay or refuse important features.

It wouldn’t be out of place to read independent review in the internet or to contact customer support to see how fast it react on your questions and requests.

Conclusion

As there are a lot of fly-by-night companies in the hosting market, it became more difficult to choose trustworthy hosting company. But it is really possible to get cheap hosting plan that will meet your needs. Sure, you shouldn’t expect large amount of bandwidth and disk space, but if you have small or medium-sized business, this amount will be quite enough for your web site.

There are many different types of hosting plans offered in the web market today. And choosing the suitable provider depends on what type of website you want to have: ecommerce site, blog or hobby.

The most common hosting plans are: shared hosting, VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting and dedicated hosting.

Below we are going to talk about the most affordable type of web hosting – shared hosting, particularly about cheap hosting services.

Cheap Hosting – When to Use?

Shared hosting is considered to be one of the cheapest services in the web market. This kind of hosting implies that your web site is located on the same server with many other different sites. On the one hand it is very comfortable with relation to the cost as you pay strictly for resources you need and you havn’t to lease the whole server. But, on the other hand, sharing resources among multitude of sites increases the risk of downtime.

So, cheap hosting is good only for small and medium size projects as it can provide access only to basic server resources. Cheap hosting shouldn’t be used if you are going to build and to maintain large network of sites. Cheap hosting doesn’t represent the best solution for web developers, programmers and service providers that want to build their own client base.

What Do You Get With Cheap Hosting?

As we’ve mentioned above, cheap hosting doesn’t imply providing a large amount of resources, but it doesn’t mean that this is not to the clients advantage as many customers need a little amount of disk space and bandwidth and don’t want to lease the whole server. So, thanks to the cheap hosting many people have opportunity to make themselves known in the internet with spending only few dollars a month.

Cheap hosting gives all resources and tools for small and medium-sized projects. Cheap hosting plan includes system administration and server maintenance. Such plan can also provide important programming features as ASP, PHP, MySQL as well as multiple e-mail address capability. Moreover, with cheap hosting you can get your own domain name. Sure, it won’t be domain name of the first rate, so, many hosting companies allow to buy better domain name somewhere else.

Cheap hosting companies make money by recommending additional software and various add-ons to their clients. In order not to overpay or, on the contrary, no to refuse necessary features, you should determine your needs and establish your requirements. It won’t be out of place to use special free tools for uptime tracking as Pingdom and Uptime Robot.

Today more and more businesses and companies decide that they need to create their own website which will help to attract more clients. Sure, why use antiquated methods while there are unlimited possibilities to present your business in the cyberspace where millions of potential clients are surfing every minute.

So, you definitely need a web site for your business, but you don’t know whether cheap hosting won’t present any risk for development of your site.

Cheap hosting name has appeared several years ago when most companies were offering nothing more than minimal space on FTP-enabled web server. This gave possibility to upload a small amount of documents and images, but not much else. Hosting companies were handling the databases and scripting applications powering the site.

Cheap hosting services of today are far more improved, offering considerable amount of disk space and bandwidth as well as administrative tools and comfortable features. So, nowadays it won’t cost an arm and a leg to set up your business online.

What Can You Get With Cheap Hosting?

Many of hosting companies offer great packages with special incentives and additional services. Many providers offer great amount of disk space and bandwidth, comprehensive web building applications, free domain names and support for different programming languages. Normally, cheap hosting package should include multiple accounts, e-commerce tools, spam filtering applications and security features.

So, it will be easy to find the hosting plan with control panel and operating system of your choice. Moreover, reliable cheap hosting provider will ensure the speed and performance needed for your site development.

Be Careful While Choosing a Host

So, now you know that even cheap hosting can provide you with enough of possibilities to set up your business online. But it doesn’t mean that all cheap hosts are offering reliable services. There are companies selling services which aren’t worth even low price. They have very limited set of features, very slow servers and non-existing customer support.

There is a multitude of cheap web hosting companies and the best way to find trustworthy host is extensive research. It is very useful to read the reviews and comments about one or another company. Consumer feedback is important as it get you ready for what to expect in terms of service and prices. Thus, you will find out what cheap hosting companies are offering service which perfectly suits your personal requirements.

Nowadays among the abundance of discount and sales, in the world where everything costs $9.99 people get adjusted to buy products and services at a low price as none wants to overpay.

But when it comes to a critical business such as web hosting, you should be very cautious as cheap hosting price should arouse much more suspicion. Many providers offer low cost as they want to attract more clients, but how paradoxically it wouldn’t sound, many clients is the main reason why cheap hosting can’t ensure high quality service.

Moreover, there are a lot of fly-by-night cheap hosting providers that can disappear with your money after a month of service.

How Cheap Hosting Companies Are Arranged?

Web hosting companies buy servers and internet connectivity in order to resell these resources to businesses and individuals who need them for websites and other web-based activities. Usually, this is realized by leasing more powerful computers called dedicated servers.

You don’t get the entire computer, but you receive resources such as disk space and bandwidth as well as the features included in the hosting plan. The main goal here is to structure this plan in such a way that it is affordable for a customer that, in its turn, will help to maximize profits based on the
available resources.

As the internet and hosting industry don’t have real limits, new web hosts emerge every day. This helps to heat up the competition and to keep prices relatively stable. But there are companies that want to grab a significant part of cheap hosting market, so, they begin to offer the lowest price in the web industry. Naturally, lowest price attracts more clients, but let’s consider the reverse of the medal.

Very Low Price Means Unreliable Service

Really quality service can’t be too cheap as it requires expenses for IT team and leasing the servers. But cheap hosting providers who offer unbelievable low price have decided to choose another way. First of all, they economize on the customer support. Such companies may have not professional support, small team of professionals that just don’t has time to deal with all technical problem arousing or they may not have technical specialists at all.

Another problem of cheap hosting is overloaded server that is shared between multiple websites. If your site is located on the overloaded server, you should expect slow pages loading or regular downtime.

The most dangerous issue is reselling the server’s resources. In order to triple their profits, some companies can resell the resources as a lot of clients don’t use all the resources provided to them. This can lead to real catastrophe as if at least 100 sites begin to use the resources implied by the hosting plan or want to upgrade, the server won’t sustain such level of load and will break.

Cheap web hosting is very affordable nowadays and, naturally, it is very popular thanks to its low price and good services provided.

But why to pay for these services if there are also free hosting plans which won’t cost you a penny?

Let’s look closer at this issue and let’s consider all advantages and disadvantages of both types of web hosting.

Advantages of Free Hosting

Sure, the fist and main advantage of cheap hosting is that you don’t have to pay for the service. There are a lot of firms which bundle free plans besides their premium solutions. For some businesses and individuals this kind of hosting is good enough, but only for very small businesses and for individuals who expect to have low level of traffic.

So, this is suitable solution for those who create web site to declare about personal endeavors or hobbies. Free hosting plan will also help to understand the inside of web service that will can make you decide to switch over the paid hosting.

Disadvantages of Free Hosting

It is obviously that disadvantages of free hosting overweight its advantages. First of all let’s talk about very limited resources you receive. You will get a very small amount of disk space to store you files and pictures. Most free host don’t even want to quote a determined amount of storage, so you may won’t be able to load even average-sized video file.

You can be limited on certain number of pages, images and overall design of the site. Moreover, free hosting doesn’t imply uptime guaranteed and technical support. Although some providers promise to resolve technical problems, you can wait for response for weeks.

As the service is free, any company won’t promise to provide support within determined period of time. It should be observed that free hosting implies obligatory the advertising placed on your web pages that can also scare away the visitors.

Cheap Hosting – Perfect Solution

Cheap hosting is ideal solution for small and medium-sized businesses as well as for individuals who want to have higher level of traffic. If taking into account the quality of service in comparison with free hosting, even $10 per month is just price for this king of hosting. As you pay money for hosting, your provider is responsible for ensuring support and making your site work effectively.

You can choose a hosting package that exactly suits your needs: disk space you need, bandwidth, settings and applications. Of course there are limitations, but you will be much less restricted and will have better control over your website.

Nowadays everybody has get adjusted to different kinds of discounts and sales, that’s why cheap hosting became so popular, especially among small businesses and those who creates web pages for personal needs.

But in spite of the cheap price this kind of hosting isn’t always attractive, as it can include additional expenses that don’t imply high quality service.

So, you should be really careful before choosing one or another web hosting company.

Poor Site Performance

Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies which runs their service on cheap and outdated hardware, making it impossible to provide customer with sufficient resources and good performance. This problem usually takes place if provider overloads its server with too many websites that can result in slow server response and downtime of your site.

Today web has become very fast and visitors don’t like to wait for the pages loading. So, instead of waiting for your site loading, they rather will find another site with faster response.

Excessive Downtime

One of the basic problems of cheap hosting is downtime that is the result of using outdated hardware, overloaded servers and lack of the infrastructure and specialists to maintain and monitor the server’s work. It is obvious that cheap services increase the risk of downtime, thus having negative impact on your business development. So, if you don’t choose reliable hosting company, you can loose traffic and your potential clients.

Spam

Cheap hosting represents an ideal environment for spammers allowing them to save money as they have place to set their annoying and dangerous advertising. Usually spammers run hundreds of sites, thus, generating small sum of money from each of the sites.

While individual amount isn’t considerable, general earning form all those sites are really huge. It doesn’t mean that hosting next to spammers will influence you directly, but this can cause serious problems for the hosting provider which houses hundreds of such sites.

It should be noted that cheap hosted sites has the same IP address. So, it can present a great problem when the entire IP address is banned and penalized by search engine machines.

Conclusion

Today cheap hosting doesn’t present the best possible solution in the web industry, it has a lot of minuses, but these minuses are caused by the appearance of many unreliable hosting providers, so-called fly-by-night companies. But, if you address to the reputable web hosting provider, it will offer you really high quality service at a cheap price.

It is not a secret that today web hosting has become a very competitive business as a multitude of companies are ready to offer you different services. Such competition has resulted in a giant segment of companies offering extremely low prices in order to attract more customers.

Naturally, low price represents perfect enticement, but let’s not forget that it also should arouse suspicion. So, you must be very careful as cheap hosting plan can cost you much more than you expected it to be.

While cheap hosting has its minuses, there is one, must be the most dangerous minus – in this kind of hosting you can meet a lot of fly-by-night companies which can grab your money and disappear in few days.

How To Spot Unreliable Company

To set up your online business, first of all, you should know how to distinguish fly-by-night provider from really reliable company. So, how do you know if one or another company will exist next year or whether it won’t disappear in three months of service? Below you will find several important points you should pay attention to when choosing a web hosting provider.

Bad Grammar and Spelling

Fly-by-night hosting companies usually don’t pay much attention to the spelling and grammar of their site’s content. As they are aimed simply to make money and to cheat clients, they often make simple steps which are easy to catch for trained eye.

Reputable and trustworthy web hosting companies pay attention to every detail and take care that their site’s content is written well and clearly explains the services.

Unprofessional Appearance

Serious-looking web site is a visiting card of reputable hosting provider.

Everything, including site’s logo, menu, design itself, should be visually pleasant and well-structured. If you are dealing with unreliable partner, you will notice at once primitive design, mediocre logo, links that don’t function in a proper way.

Usually such sites don’t contain a lot of information about their firm history and principles.

Improbable Testimonials

Undoubtedly, testimonials represent a very powerful marketing tool for any kind of business. But the point is that you can’t always check whether they are true. Fly-by-nigh companies always have testimonials from super happy customers raving about the service and technical support. You can always distinguish this by examining the style of writing and by finding special advertising tricks in the comments.

You must have asked yourself why so many hosting companies have different prices for almost the same services? The point is that like in any other business, in web hosting industry there are shady companies looking for earning money very quickly and then to disappear.

Usually, they offer their services at a much more higher price hoping that someone will pay for them. Undoubtedly, most web hosting providers have legitimate reasons for the prices they fix, whether they are high or low. So, let’s have a closer look at what has the most impact on the cost.

Technical Support

This factor is one of the most important factors influencing the cost of the web host service. Companies delivering quality support and quickly respond to technical problems have much more skilled and professional support team. As maintaining such team is by no means cheap, naturally, this service won’t be cheap in your hosting plan. Certain companies want to economize on support team in order to offer cheaper service. In most cases such business doesn’t survive.

Network and Infrastructure

A considerable amount of the costs for web hosting services can be attributed to the company’s network and infrastructure.

In some cases hosting companies store their servers in many different data centers that is also expensive.

Finally, to ensure high quality and reliable service hosting providers need electrical systems, redundant internet connections, backup power and security features. So, all this is included in the cost of the hosting plan.

Loss Selling

There are hosting providers that sell at loss hoping to expand their client base and selling the same services at a higher price in the perspective. Such companies can cut cost for such services as SSL certificates, web design, search engine marketing in order to make them more attractive for the customers. But you should remember that in spite of the fact that you can purchase hosting services at a lower price, here is always risk to receive low quality service.

Overselling

This is the basic reason why prices are going cheap. For example, if one customer doesn’t use all the allocated resources, hosting company can resell them to the other client. It is good if such provider is able to maintain quality of service, but generally, this can’t last for a long time. It is really risky as there is always the chance that several customers will decide to maximize the resources.

There is a lot of reasons why people set up their business in the cyberspace, but the most common is the wish to earn money online. Sure, if you are newcomer in the world of online business, it will be very difficult to plan all the tasks, especially if you are completely unfamiliar with different processes of managing and building your own site. And at the very beginning of this multifaceted process you should learn a lot and, naturally, you should cut expenses as much as possible because there is no sens to make serious investment when you are inexperienced.

What Do You Need To Begin With?

In the online business it is very important to start up slow, to become proficient in basics, to explore the inside tracks and then to uprgarde. So, in this case cheap hosting will be the best solution helping to learn and to save money. But if you want your site to develop, you should choose hosting plan allowing to uprgade.

The general mistake is the opinion that you don’t need any complex tools, but in fact, the less experience you have, the more tools you need. You will definitely need tools to manage software and to hosting accounts. Any good website owner always has an arsenal of tools at his disposal and these are the tools which help to keep business functioning efficiently.

Cost and Effectiveness

In online business industry we always hear one very important term – “cost-effectiveness.” So, what does it imply and is it really so important? Generally it is used to determine whether someone gets what he pays for. However, effectiveness and cost don’t go hand in hand. Generally, you get what you pay for that means if you pay less, you get less.

If we are talking about web hosting, it is necessary to say that the more you pay, the more effective service you’ll get. It should be also observed that hosting companies also make investment, so they spent a certain amount of money to provide you with the resources you need. The key moment is to give you cheap hosting plan without sacrificing its quality.

True Cost of Cheap Web Hosting

As it was noted above, if you want your site to promote you should choose the hosting plan allowing you to upgrade if it is your main target. So, you can choose very cheap hosting plan and pay more as you upgrading or you can choose a plan offering a considerable amount of resources at once that can turn out even cheaper. Note that second variant will allow you to decrease the risk of downtime and increase the level of performance.

While there is a multitude of hosting plans available, choosing the right one always represents a difficult task for a novice web master. Having years of experience, reliable cheap hosting companies always have something to offer their new clients taking into account all their needs.

So, your task is to find suitable hosting plan and then to find out what provider offers the best type of this plan. But if you address to really trustworthy and professional provider interested in long-term collaboration, it will surely advice you what hosting plan is the best for you at the moment.

Exploring Web With Help of Cheap Hosting

If you would like to test in practice how the web hosting industry works, cheap hosting will become the best solution in this case. If you aren’t familiar with the process of setting up a site and you have no idea about what hosting plan you need, you definitely should start with the cheapest plan to learn how it works and what it includes.

In this case you should choose a company that will allow you to upgrade if you need to, thus, you will always have adequate resources. Note that upgrading should be done with simple phone call or e-mail to the web hosting company.

Cheap Hosting For Small Web Sites

Cheap hosting is very in demand among small sites such as blogs, personal web pages as well as among small and medium-sized businesses. In this case customers need a small amount of server resources and it makes no sense to lease the entire server if all its resources will be inactive.

Cheap hosting account is also perfect if you have a lot of domain names and you are going to use them for blogs. In this case it still remains actual to choose the hosting plan which provides you with option of upgrading.

Reselling

Another strong reason to lease shared server is the possibility to resell some of the resources implied by your hosting plan without paying a lot of money in advance. Some cheap web hosts can offer you to pay on monthly basis, some can offer you to pay for a year in advance.

If you are ready to pay in advance, you should make sure that in case you want to change the hosting plan or the hosting company itself, this provider will pay back. It is no less important to learn the details about technical support as only reliable companies which are in the hosting market many years can provide you with high quality service and technical support.