3 Ways to Tell if a Cheap Web Hosting Service is Bad

Cheap web hosting services are usually hard to judge, especially if the website has a very professional appearance. As the saying goes, never judge a book by its cover. Fortunately, there are ways around this blindness, and several methods exist which you can use to tell if the cheap web hosting plan you are considering is good.

1. The Technical Support Test

Send a support ticket or e-mail with a query to the web host during a weekend and take note of the time they took to respond to your question. If the response time was under 3 hours, it is considered to be good enough and it means that your website will be attended to within that timeframe if you were to encounter any problems. However, you should also note the quality of the reply to see if they are technically excellent. Many hosting companies do not hire reliable employees and this usually results in unanswered and unsolved problems that just drag on throughout your contract with the company.

2. The Website Speed Test

If the web hosting company’s website loads slowly, you can be quite sure that yours will to if you choose to let them serve your website. Cheap web hosting companies usually reduce costs by putting everyone on the same server and same connection, causing heavy congestion of both the processor and data line, which results in longer load times for the website. This is a huge turn-off for people who visit your site and according to a study, 4 seconds is the maximum time someone will wait before they leave and 75% will never intend to go back to your website ever again.

3. The Features Test

Look at the features of the web host and determine whether another person that would be on your server has the ability to abuse any feature that will jeopardize everyone else. If it is unlimited bandwidth, someone could use it to host popular and big files that will cause the connection to slow down for everyone on the server, resulting in slow websites that drive visitors away. If there is unlimited disk space, the abuser could fill it up with huge files such as DVDs and eventually fill up the whole disk, leading to errors that will affect the files of everyone else.

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