Everything about Cheap Web Hosting

Shared hosting is also known as cheap hosting, that's because in cheap hosting a server is shared to reduce the cost of hosting, as the recourses are minimized. This is the same concept used in shared hosting.

Before signing the contract with hosting company to get your desired services, the company may ask some in-depth questions to ensure that whether you understand the services for which you are looking for. And what customer experiences you are expecting from the hosting providers. On the other hand provided services may vary from company to company. It depends upon you to make sure that whether or not the services provided by company meets your expectations. Before even beginning your search, analyze what your needs are. Would you like e-mail addresses? Do you have a domain name? How much traffic do you expect to receive? All these questions and more help in the final decision for that one glorious hosting company.

Keeping this in mind when choosing cheap web hosting

Searching around for a cheap web hosting company? Here's what to keep in mind.

•  Response Time of Server

•  Provided Bandwidth.

•  Provided disk space.

•  Used Hardware and Server Technology.

•  Custom pop e-mail accounts.

•  Hosting company's support services.

Response Time of the server refers to the number of sites you can access from server at a time; if access numbers of sites on server are limited then response time of server will be slow. Second thing should be keep in mind is the hardware used and the availability of possible bandwidth. In the midst of your search, you'll probably run across hosting services that offer 'unlimited bandwidth'. This is simply not true, the term 'bandwidth' refers to the amount of information that is past between the hosting servers and the end user. Most hosting companies are connected to high-speed Internet backbones (UUNET, Sprint, AT&T, etc) which charge the hosting company based on their monthly bandwidth from customers. Be sure to read the terms of service very carefully with each hosting company that you are considering, especially if they advertise 'free' or 'unlimited' site features.

If you have purchased your own domain name, be sure the hosting company supports them (mostly do), and be sure they give you at least 1 e-mail address (you@yourdomain.com). A lot of companies offer 10 or more custom pop e-mail accounts with unlimited forwarding address at little or no additional cost, which is a nice feature.

Cheap hosting has its own advantages and disadvantages: -

Typical cheap hosting accounts provide from few to many features, and in modern days they provide most features needed, like one domain per account, several sub domains in some cases, email hosting, web scripting and database. However since there are so many websites hosted under same server, they all share similar configuration. Therefore, with cheap hosting the features available are pretty much fixed into a few available configurations. Also, the hosting provider will likely not modify the server configuration for a particular shared hosting customer, so you will have to use what you get. If you are not satisfied about a given configuration, you may have to change the hosting account or even go to a different provider if necessary.

Cheap web hosting limitations

It is also important to know about cheap hosting limitations. Startup websites and small business websites can usually be hosted properly on cheap hosting, since they usually have low traffic and fewer disk space needed. But in time, as requirements for traffic, disk space and features will grow; websites may have to be moved from cheap or shared hosting to dedicated hosting accounts. There are other things that may influence your hosting choice; for example support services are much better for dedicated hosting accounts, especially with managed hosting, because each engineer is assigned to a much lower number of accounts, and therefore much better support is provided.