SolveYourProblem
Article Series: Web Hosting
Teach Me Web Hosting Essentials
Say
No to Cheap Web Hosting
It doesn’t matter where you look today – you’re
bound to run into someone who is offering you cheap web hosting.
There are tons of different web hosts out there, and with all
of those different options, it can be very confusing. Some
people and businesses swear by cheap web hosting, while others
despise it. An old adage applies in this situation, and that
adage is that you get what you pay for. Unfortunately, if you’re
not extremely careful with cheap web hosting, this can prove
to be fatal to your website.
There
are five things you should look for when choosing a web
host, and unfortunately the majority of cheap web hosts
fail in almost all of these areas. Cheap web hosts can provide
a really negative experience to the small start-up company
who’s just trying to eek out a living, and they can be a headache
to the much larger companies who are trying to continue to
gain ground on their competition.
The first thing you need to think about when looking for a
web host is what your required bandwidth is going to be. This
is because if you exceed your bandwidth at anytime, your website
will be shut down. Oftentimes, you will be shut down without
warning. If you are with a really cheap web host, they may
not even tell you that you’ve been shut down, or why you’ve
been shut down. This is one of the areas where supposedly cheap
web hosting can get you. They start off by saying how cheap
they are, and you’re hooked. You sign the contract without
looking into it too closely, and after a few days your website
is shut down because you’ve used up all of your available bandwidth.
How do you avoid this situation? Well, for starters you need
to read every contract you get – you should be doing that anyway.
Secondly, figure out how much bandwidth you’re going to need.
The more files, images and traffic you have on your website
the more bandwidth you’re going to need. Bandwidth is one of
those things that you have to be willing to spend to get to
– so say no to cheap web hosting, and get decent bandwidth.
The next thing cheap web hosts will try to sucker you in with
is multiple domain names. They give you the cheap package,
and offer extra domain names. However, what they don’t tell
you is that your bandwidth will apply to all of these domains.
If you have two domain names, and they both exceed three gigabytes
of bandwidth and you only have five – you’ll lose both of your
sites, not just one.
Sometimes cheap web hosts will talk about how they offer unlimited
domain names. These cheap web hosts are the sleazy ones who
are trying to screw you out of your money, and should be avoided
at all costs. Why would you use more than one domain if they
were all going to count towards your bandwidth, and result
in a lot of your sites being shut down? Avoid these web hosts
at all costs – they are trying to screw you, to put it bluntly.
To the uninitiated, unlimited bandwidth sounds incredibly
promising. You pay a small amount like ten dollars a month,
and then you get the unlimited bandwidth. Sounds too good to
be true and it is. These web hosts are hoping for a lot of
people to sign up so that they can balance their distribution
costs. However, if your site is too high on bandwidth, they
will shut you down because you are costing them money. Beware
of anything that smells a little too sweet.
Many cheap web hosts don’t provide the storage you get from
their larger counterparts. This isn’t as big of a deal as you
might think, as most businesses won’t exceed their storage
allotment. The only time where a person may exceed their limit
is if there is a lot of video or mp3’s on their site. Of course,
storage isn’t usually the issue. Instead it’s bandwidth.
All in all cheap web hosts can be great, but you have to do
a ton of homework on them first. They can cause a lot more
problems then they can solve, and may end up costing you more
in the long run.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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