Read Independent Reviews on Cheap Web Site Hosting Companies
Web hosting has gotten cheaper and cheaper recently with some web site hosting providers offering gigabytes of space and tens of gigabytes of bandwidth for under $3 per month. What many don't know is many of these
web site hosting companies are overselling their server. They are betting on the fact that most people will not use almost all the resources that they buy.
This is not a bad gamble, as most people do not use all the space and bandwidth that come with the account. However, overselling needs to be done in a careful trend. Many hosts oversell too much and their clients end up on slow server with recurrent outages.
When looking for a host provider keep in mind that "You Get What you Pay for". If you pay $3 for a website
hosting plan, you will almost certainly get $3 worth of web hosting and service. To avoid hosts with very bad tech support and recurrent server outages, we recommend you go with a
web host that sells at something like $.50/(GIG of Bandwidth and 25mb space) ratio.
These website hosts are cheap and with that ratio the hosting provider can make a decent profit on his services to provide sufficient tech support. Do not go for the
hosts offering 1GB space and 50GB bandwidth for $5. There is a likely chance that you will end up on a slow server with insensitive tech support.
The first step to finding a cheap web site
hosting plan is to find out what you need for your site. Most of the time, people will way overestimate and buy far more than they need or they will buy a package that just does not have the features to suit them. The first thing is to decide which platform you want to host on, either Linux or Windows. Windows
hosting is usually more expensive than
Linux hosting. If you wish to use a database driven web site with php, then certainly go Linux as
Windows PHP has certain problems at times.
After you have chosen the platform, you need to think about how much space you need in your
web hosting plan. Most cheap
web site hosting companies offer several plans ranging in space/bandwidth so be sure to get a precise prediction on how much you will need.
Bandwidth is the other subject and most likely the one people tend to overestimate the most. Just because your website may get a couple of hundred visits per day does not mean you need globs of bandwidth. If you have less than 1500 unique visitors a day and your site is mostly text files with a few images, probably 5-8 GB of bandwidth per month is sufficient to host your website on.
After figuring out the space and bandwidth requirements, also take into account other important things, such as scripting support, database support, and control panel. To keep a look ahead for development, you possibly want to make sure that your cheap web host provider has some scripting support (PHP, PERL, ASP) and has database support (MySQL, MSSQL, MSACESS) as most large sites are database driven. Many famous
cheap web site hosting companies allow you to upgrade or downgrade web page hosting plans for free.