by Reach out for Kenya

Guide to choosing and affordable web hosting service

Affordable Web Hosting Guide

On this page, I’m going to give you some good guidelines to picking an affordable web hosting company.

Guidelines for picking affordable web hosting

The first place to start evaluating affordable hosting companies is their own home page. This should give you an indication of their professionalism? How easy is it to find all of the information you are looking for? Make sure you have a look at their contact information. What information do they give? Do they list a physical address, an email address and a phone number to contact them? If they don’t provide any contact details, do be careful. If you run into problems setting up your website, which does happen from time to time and you have no proper contact information, how are you going to get the problem resolved if you can not contact them?

There are a lot of different guidelines to think about when choosing a affordable web hosting. You always want to find the most affordable web hosting possible. Below, I will list some things to keep in mind when debating which web hosting service to use. Keep these guidelines in your head.

1. Does the price seem TOO cheap? If it seems too cheap, then it’s probably not a reliable web hosting service.

2. Is the price TOO expensive? If you can’t see yourself paying what the company is asking, then don’t sign up. Always pick web hosting that you can afford.

3. How is the web hosting company’s web site design? If the design looks really ugly, then don’t even bother. As far as professional service goes, if you don’t even have a decent looking web site design, then why would you even try to sell web hosting??

4. Compare all of the features, look beyond just disk space and bandwidth. Some of the features that will matter in your journey to find an affordable web hosting service include: MySQL databases, Email accounts, Number of Add-on/Parked domains available, Control panel. The most user friendly control panel available is cPanel. Always prefer cPanel for your control panel.

5. Does the host oversell itself? Do they offer a plan that is only for unlimited space and bandwidth? Don’t even bother, the host will be down within a couple months.

6. Pay the extra dollar. Pay the extra couple bucks. Get a good web hosting package that is both affordable, and packed with features. Don’t let yourself be a victim of having your website go down.

7. Pay attention to uptime guarantees, and SLA (Service level agreements). If the host guarantees 100% network access, this is a very good thing. Look for clauses such as refunds if the host has one.

You have spent time and money getting your website ready. The last thing you want is for the inexpensive web hosting to have long or many down times. So check what their uptime guarantee is, the guarantee refers to the amount of time the server is live and running your web pages. An uptime guarantee of 99% means that the host guarantees that their servers will be up and operational 99% of the time. Over the course of one year, 99% uptime would represent a downtime (the one percent) of around 87 hours in a year or an average of 7 hours per month. An uptime of 99.9% would involve only 8 hours of downtime for the entire year.