Web Hosting Reviews & Ratings

June 02, 2011

Cheap Web Hosting – Why Cheap isn’t Always Best

When selecting a cheap web hosting service to manage your website needs, it’s easy to become confused with the bombardment of hosting advertisements that flood cyberspace.  Although successful marketing demands such ad campaigns, for users it’s often more of a nuisance when it comes to selecting the best host to accommodate website demands.   There are several things to keep in mind, however, when choosing an affordable web host.

Cheap isn’t Always Best

Many web hosts offer free and very cheap hosting services such as Bravenet.  On the surface, free hosting sounds like the best thing since sliced bread; however, as a general rule these hosts are not intended to manage business or company websites.  Instead such web hosts are best suited for small and personal endeavors.   Also, free host members should expect to design web pages around the required advertisements that are required to be displayed to support free service.  For personal homepages and blogs, free hosting is a good option; however, larger websites with heavy traffic should avoid such hosting platforms to avoid the numerous headaches that are sure to ensue with free hosting.

Bandwidth and Disk Space Limitations

The cliché “you get what you pay for” is usually true, especially when it comes to web hosting.  Similar to free hosting, customers should also realize that cheap hosting has its limitations.  Perhaps the greatest disadvantage of cheap hosting is the limitation of the available services offered including bandwidth, disk space and domain names.

While such restricting factors are not a debilitating issue when supporting personal web pages, however, for larger websites it typically means frequent downtime if the site exceeds the allocated bandwidth.  It’s also not uncommon for sites to be offline permanently for repeat offenders.  If you plan to integrate videos or MP3s into your website, then cheap hosting with limited bandwidth is definitely not a wise choice.

Back-up Services

If your intended purpose of managing a website is to store important data, cheap web hosting is not the best viable choice.  Any web developer knows that back-up services is essential for protecting important data.  Cheap web hosts, however, generally don’t provide data back-up services.  So, unless you’re a responsible website owner with the available resources to perform nightly back-ups, a more expensive web hosting plan may be the most efficient option to ensure data protection.

Final Caveat

Although cheap web hosting does offer numerous advantages, it’s best implemented for supporting small websites with limited traffic flow.  Many marketing gurus and web developers also setup a cheap web host account to test a specific niche or interact with compatible scripting applications.  For those opting for a cheap web host, keep in mind that control over the website is limited at best from design options to bandwidth.   Individual hosting needs should dictate the desired web host.

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