by rjnagle

The Essentials of Cheap Web Hosting

It seems that people these days are after affordability rather than quality of a particular product. This also holds true with web hosting. When it comes to web hosting service providers, people are on the lookout for cheaper alternatives, and they’re often not disappointed because there are tons and tons of choices out there.

The big question, though is, are cheap web hosting service providers up to the task of providing quality services? A lot of people may tell you it’s virtually impossible to expect cheap web hosts to offer basically the same quality of services as their professional counter parts. After all, professional web hosts have to invest a lot of money to enable them to offer the best features to their clients.

Actually, it really depends on how you look at cheap web hosting. As you must know, there have been many developments during the past few years which may have influenced the changes in the pricing of web hosting services. Companies are neck and neck in making their rates more competitive in the hope of winning more clients. Cheap web hosting in this case is simply a reduction of in the web hosting plan rates due to competition, without compromising the quality of service and the features being offered.

You can also look at cheap web hosting as the absence or lack of certain features. For example, while a costly web host has the capability of providing 99.99% uptime percentage, the most that a cheap web host can offer its clients is only 99.00-99.50%. That’s not a bad number, actually as it means that your site is up and running on the web 99% – 99.50% of the time, and that is fairly acceptable already especially if you are operating just a personal or a small to medium sized business website.
 
Needless to say, here are several things you need to keep in mind when choosing a web host:

1. Uptime percentage – this is the amount of time that your website is being seen on the World Wide Web. A good uptime percentage should not be below 99% when you are dealing with a cheap web host.

2. Control panel hosting – many cheap web hosts offer cPanel hosting for the convenience of their clients. It’s user-friendly, so you are not going to find it hard to navigate your way through.

3. Speed – the time it takes for your page to completely upload is also a big factor to consider. Keep in mind that your visitors may not have the patience to wait for your site to upload.

4. Customer service and technical support – these factors should never be overlooked when looking for a host for your site. Technical assistance should be available 24/7 via phone support, live chat, or some other means. Problems may arise at any time, and when they do, you would want to be able to contact your web host immediately. It can be very frustrating just looking at error pages and not being able to know what to do with them.

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