Choices choices everywhere. There are essentially six items to look at when deciding on a cheap web hosting plan : Reliability, Price, Bandwidth, Disk Space, Services and Hosting Location.
- Reliability. The web hosting industry is fraught with stories of downed servers and unhappy customers. The number one thing a web hosting compnay provides is uptime. Don’t pay attention to the percentage of uptime (ie many will advertise 99.9% uptime, etc.). Do pay attention to other user’s recommendations.
- Price. It is easy to overpay for services not needed. A beginner should look at paying no more than $5-$15/month. A lot of web hosting that is suitable for the beginner or even small to medium size websites falls within that price range.
- Bandwidth. For a text based/few images website like RWT, 5 GB of bandwidth would be the equivalent of 750 visitors a day or around 40,000 pageviews a month. Most web host offer at least 5 GB of bandwidth which is more than enough for beginners. Nowadays, most hosting companies offer unlimited bandwidth so the question is almost moot.
- Disk Space. Disk space keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. Diskspace starts at around 500mb and goes up from there. This website isn’t yet close to using up 100 MB of space. Web hosts provide more than is needed. However, graphic intensive or download intensive websites will need ALL the space they can get. Again, most companies now offer unlimited disk space
- Services. A web hosting company should provide a package that includes at a minimum: PHP, MySQL, and email. Any blogging application like WordPress or MovableType will require the MySQL database as well as PHP. Be careful with the version of PHP a web host provides. PHP 5 has been known to break many current PHP applications. Make sure any applications using PHP are compatible with version 5 otherwise make sure the web host provides a version of PHP 4.
- Hosting Location The actual physical location where the web hosting company’s servers are located is very important. Why? Back to point number one: reliability. Ask this question: Is the web hosting company located in a country where the infrastructure is reliable and stable? By infrastructure, we include items like the economy and utilities. Contact the company by phone to verify the location of their servers.
Keep in mind that 500 mb of storage and 6 GB of bandwidth is rapidly ering replaced as a “basic package”. Several hosts are now offering way more than a 1 GB of storage and over 100 GB’s of bandwidth within the $5-10 range. These numbers are more than sufficient for any beginner. Overkill really. But if they offer it take advantage of it!
Check out our two recommendations for Web Hosting:
- A sound reliable host for hosting multiple sites Low cost web hosting if the above option may be a tad overkill for you
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