Archive for April, 2008

Cheap Web Hosting with a Twist

Are you settling with a mediocre web host just because you are on a tight budget?

The slow load times for your website. The server downtime. The slow response to your technical support tickets.

What if I told you you could get a more expensive plan for the price of what most people would consider cheap?

The method here is simple - share your hosting account with other people. This will enable you to get a more expensive hosting plan at a lower cost, and possibly lower than any single hosting plan will ever cost you.

When you get a cheap web hosting plan, you are already sharing the server with possibly thousands of others, so why not just share the account? After all, all the accounts share the same processor and hard disk of the server and it would not make a difference to share one account with just one subscription fee between a few people.

“If it’s so simple, why is no one doing it?”

I’m sure there are a few people already doing this, but why this is not very common is simple - the web hosts do not tell you that you can do that, and most people simply never think about doing this, especially if they do not know about the technical aspects of hosting. It is virtually indifferent from having two seperate accounts that share the same server.

One way to do this is to go to webmaster forums and post to see who else needs a web host, then it is simply a matter of deciding which host and which plan to use. Alternatively, you can advertise your need on your instant messenger account and see who responds to it.

Using this technique will get you a better host and give you a better overall experience with hosting your website. Granted, it requires a little more work but the long term benefits you will have make it worth the effort.


The Pitfalls of Cheap Web Hosting

Ever heard of the saying “You get what you pay for”? This hold true for many products and services, and web hosting is no exception. There are downsides to using cheap web hosting and it can cause you trouble that you never wished you even knew about. Many individuals and businesses have suffered these and lost a lot. Here, we will talk about the few pitfalls that using cheap web hosting can cause you and some ways you can avoid them.

1. Data Loss

When the servers fail and the web hosting provider did not have the competency to at least create backups for their clients, precious data created and stored in the server can be lost forever. This holds true especially for websites that have information stored in databases as these are not kept as standard files and people with less technical knowledge never bother to find out how to back these up. Learn how to back up your databases and you can reduce the effects of this disaster when it happens.

2. Business Disasters

When you need your product’s website up for a special launch that will bring in hundreds of potential customers within the hour, you would not want the servers to break down for long as every minute in that state would cause huge losses of potential profit for your business. You will want to have people you can approach almost instantly to get your problem solved, and this means having a good technical support team behind the desk round the clock, ready for anything you throw at them at any time. Make sure your web host has a competent support team.

3. Moving Costs

Moving your website can be a pain. You either lose time, or you lose money. When you decide to move to a better host that will meet your needs more vigilantly, you need to download all the files you have along with the database and re-upload everything to the new server. This is time consuming and you can spend your time doing other things that will achieve more, which brings us to outsourcing, which will cost money. You would not want to encounter this situation.

The best way to avoid these is to find a good host in the first place, and that is not hard when you know how to find one.


Cheap Web Hosting for Your Business

Bringing a business or building a whole business online is becoming very popular and many people flock online to try and establish a presence or even to make a living. But then the question of web hosting comes in and many people are lost as to which hosting plan they should get. If a business depends on its website, as with those that use the internet for all their profits, expensive web hosting usually comes to mind because quality usually stands behind price. However, in the world of web hosting, price is not so much a factor of the quality and many are deceived when they use this principal to seek a reliable web hosting provider.

When it comes to web hosting, it is less of the price and more about the brand. Many web hosting companies online are run by business people who have no experience in this field, and this usually ends up in disastrous conscequences such as data loss and long server downtimes.

No one wants to put their business at risk, but because most people do not know the facts, they place themselves in the danger zone without even knowing it.

Choosing a web host is not about the hardware features. These features are the last thing you want to look at when using price as a comparison. When your server goes down, you will want to have people tending to your problem as soon as possible and this service is the all famous technical support. Make sure that the technical support is good and choose this over 1000 gigabytes of space, which you won’t really need.

Cheap web hosting, when you find the right one, is most definitely better than all the expensive alternatives out there that charge based on hardware features, lacking in the most essential components that will help your website run with as little downtime as possible. Choose the right company to host your business website and it will not just be cheap, but something your business can depend on.


How can cheap web hosting be so cheap?

If you’ve been updated with all the latest news on technology and hardware, it is not hard to see why hosting is as cheap as it is now. Just awhile ago in the 1990s, web hosting was only for the serious people who had the capital to rent the expensive hosting. That was when technology was still young and the power each computer had was a scarce. Nowadays, there is just too much power packed in the computers that it is impossible for most websites to even utilize a tiny fraction of its maximum potential.

In this age of such advanced technology, each web server can host thousands of websites and still function well without any hitches. This allows web hosting companies to charge extremely low prices as the overhead costs of having a server is easily covered with the number of people it can accommodate.

Bandwidth has also become much cheaper lately, with ISPs offering unlimited downloads and uploads. The average connection speed of each household has risen many folds in just a few years, with a huge fraction of people in the world using broadband nowadays. Most websites do not even use a few cents worth of bandwidth each month, in terms of costs to the web hosting provider, which means that they can offer more with less yet again.

Cheap web hosting is simply a result of the companies leveraging on technology to provide their services at breakneck prices and compete in this competitive market. More and more hosts nowadays are emerging with low rates that no one would have imagined existing just a few years ago. Now, even regular teenagers can afford web hosting and it won’t even leave a dent in their finances.

Hopefully, you now understand how cheap web hosting can be as cheap as it is right now and that these are not scams. Rather, it is a business model that aims at putting this service within the reach of the masses and acquiring more customers.


Comparing Cheap Web Hosting Plans

Cheap web hosting plans - there are so many of them and you are confused as to which to pick. Choosing between $8.95/month hosting plans is a tough thing to do, especially since they all seem to offer out-of-this-world features - more disk space than you will ever need, unlimited bandwidth and all the others you won’t even need to use.

These are a few things you should consider before you settle on the cheap web hosting plan:

1. The Company’s Reputation

Look out for unbiased opinions from their other clients to see if they have provided a good service. These can be found in forums and sometimes on the host’s very own website. If the comments about the host are good and the website they are hosting is similar to yours, you can be quite sure that they will be able to sustain your website. However, make sure to look for the negatives as well, as this will come in handy when comparing between cheap web hosting plans.

2. Uptime

Having a cheap web hosting plan is no reason for having a low uptime. In fact, it should be quite the opposite since they are serving thousands of clients on each server. The profits may even be higher for these hosting companies for their cheap hosting plans, and they should have the capital to invest in a technically sound support person to handle any problems. 99.5% uptime is what you should be looking at. Any lower and you should avoid the web host.

3. Technology

Some web hosts focus on cheap web hosting plans and develop special technology to reduce the problems that traditional hosting services of this price range usually cause. Things like splitting workload over to multiple servers that are linked up ensures that no one server is too congested as it can maximize the power of the computers.

This should be enough to help you decide on which web host to choose. However, there is definitely more than one company that can provide good and cheap web hosting, so feel free to flip a coin when it narrows down to two that seem just as good as each other.


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