The best web hosting companies provide excellent 24-hour support that will answer your questions almost instantaneously and provide the most mind-blowing quality of servers that hardly seem to break down. You must be thinking - all of these web hosting companies of such calibre probably cost a bomb. Wrong. Cheap web hosting companies can provide such services as well, and they should.
Did you know that the profits for cheap web hosting can amount to more than that of costlier alternatives?
This means that companies that offer cheap web hosting should also be able to provide good technical support since they can afford to fork out more. There is no reason for them to neglect their customers just because they are paying less. You get the speed disadvantages of cheap web hosting and that is fine - but they should provide the support to aid you in times when you will need it, especially when the hardware fails. You signed up for the cheap web hosting plan because you knew you only needed that much power, but it seems you also get the consequence of having bad support. Web hosting should be about the hardware, and the good support is something that should be there and it is simple why - to provide the best experience for the customers that rent your servers.
The best web hosts also make it a point to maintain their servers to keep the problems of shared hosting at bay. When so many people are using the same server, it is important to ensure that no one person causes anything to the server as it would affect hundreds or even thousands of other customers. Many cheap web hosts do not take good care of their severs well enough and a few abusive clients usually break it, causing everyone else’s websites to fall into oblivion along with the server.
The creme of the crop are the web hosts that invest in technology that enhance shared hosting and eliminates all the disadvantages of cheap web hosting while still maintaining the affordable price point. These hosts are usually the best as they have already proven to have excellent technical support from the fact that they can set up such a sophisticated system. There are a few out there, and you just have to know how to find them.
What is web hosting?
Web hosting is simply the act of renting space on someone else’s server that will help you serve your website out to people whenever they need it. The owner of the server should be reliable and be able to handle any technical issues that come by as it is their job to do so.
You will want to find a good web host that can ensure that your website is fully functional almost every minute of the year. This does not have to be something costly. In fact, price is not a factor of how good a web host is most of the time. Price only comes in when the technologies used come into play, but for the most part, that applies only to big corporations with special needs. This means that you can and should find cheap web hosting that is reliable instead of searching for a higher-priced competitor that does not know how to run a web hosting company.
All you probably want is to have a place where you can place the files that you have created to share with the world, and for this, you will most probably only need a few features. Take note of these features and dispose of the others that only serve to blind you from making a good decision on choosing the right hosting plan.
1. Hard Disk Space
Most people, including you, will need less than 100 megabytes of space in reality, and any more would be redundant. Hosts that offer unlimited hard disk space are usually bad, and it only serves to show how inexperienced they are to offer such a feature. Many of these hosts end up shutting down their servers when they reach the limit due to their over-hyped offer. Remember, you are sharing the server with other people, and having a limit is better since it will prevent abusers that will ruin everyone else.
2. Technical Support
You will want to be able to get assistance with any problem you might have as soon as possible. If your website goes down, you want the company to have it fixed as soon as possible. This is where technical support comes in. Find a host with 24-hour technical support so that you can ensure that your problems are attended as and when you need it.
These are two of the more important things you need to consider when looking for cheap web hosting.
Maybe you want to set up a personal blog for your friends to read at any time of the day.
Perhaps you want to bring your business to a whole new level and came to the wonderous place known as the internet to advertise your products and services to the world.
Then the question comes: Where can I host my website?
More often than not, people who first come online searching for a place to host their website stumble upon offers that just seem out of this world - unlimited bandwidth, more disk space than you will ever need, and the unbelievablely low price for these features. Without the technical know-how and understanding of how web hosting works, many then meet with the tragedies that follow - data loss, profits reduced and even online business failures.
Finding a good host is not about the price, as you will know if you are technically sound. Hardware nowadays are all on par and almost all, if not all of the hosts in the world have hardly any difference when it comes to the servers. Technology has reached a such a high level where there is simply no need for anything better, and what matters now is the ability of the web hosts to solve any problems that you might have as an when you need it.
When looking for a good web host, see if they provide 24-hour support and then proceed onto checking the response rate by sending a ticket with a question and seeing how long it takes for them to reply. The reason for this is simple - you want to get help as quickly as possible if you encounter any problems, or if the host has any problems.
Another thing you should look out for are the testimonials the host has, especially those that are at least a few years old. If a successful website has been hosted at the same place for years, you can be sure that it is reliable as the customer would have already left if the host wasn’t good.
Cheap web hosting offered by a good company is often better than expensive plans that are run by business people who know nothing about computers. The best way to tell is by other people’s success stories, because they represent the real-world capabilities of the web hosting company.
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.
Your website loads within 1 second for any visitor that comes in, and it accomodates 1000 visitors each day with server-intensive scripts running each time a visitor goes to your website. This is what a good web hosting company can handle, even if it is cheap web hosting they are providing you.
Cheap web hosting does not mean that the hardware is inferior. In fact, cheap web hosting servers are usually more powerful than dedicated ones as the web hosting companies accomodate more people into every one of these servers, allowing them to spend more and still get a profit out of it. The only problem is when each website on the same server uses up more processing power or bandwidth than the expected average, resulting in slower load times for all the websites on that particular server.
A good host will be able to cope with these problems. As long as the web hosting company has competent, technically technically excellent people working for them, you should be able to count on their ability to fix your problems as and when they do happen. Even if they do not do it automatically, having a good team behind the servers will ensure that you get proper assistance when you encounter any difficulties.
Certain web hosts have technology that allows their servers to share any workload in terms of bandwidth and processing power, which are much better than most expensive virtual-dedicated or dedicated web hosting plans in most cases. The combined powers of these servers will further ensure that coincidental misfortunes of having too many server-intensive websites on one particular server is not a problem, and the website that operates above average levels will stand to gain since they will be using more for less.
Cheap web hosting can be good if you choose the right web host. Hardware limits is not so much the issue, as you have learnt, when it comes to web hosting and it is more about how the web host maintains their servers to ensure that everyone gets a sufficient amount of bandwidth and disk space dedicated to them for their websites to function.
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