Affordable web hosting is not only defined by the monetary cost, but also by the opportunity cost and the time you’ll spend getting a web hosting company that doesn’t do what you need. You’ll see at the end of this article who I use and here are a few of the things I evaluate when considering a web hosting company to go with.
I don’t consider space to be that important as the arms race between web hosting competitors means that I don’t have to worry about running out of space for any of my websites. Even sites hosting a significant amount of video aren’t going to run into space problems.
Bandwidth is another component of web hosting that will only be a problem if you get a huge influx of traffic all at once. You’ll probably run out of server processes before you run out of bandwidth. For instance, if one of your “diggs” goes to the front page of digg.com, there is definitely a likelihood that your $10 per month or less web host won’t have the server processes allocated to handle that much traffic which means your site may crash. Don’t fret because this is a great problem to have.
One of the things I look for with an affordable web hosting company is how their technical support is and where their technical support is located. I prefer a company whose employees speak the same language as I do without accents I have difficulty understanding. Technical competency is important as well, but with the relative simplicity of web servers and these accounts today, this isn’t a very big deal either.
Having a good control panel that is easy to navigate through and provides easy management options is vital. It’s one thing if you know your way around at the command line of a terminal connecting you to your server, but even then the likelihood of messing something up increases. A good control panel has all of the common options easily accessible and the less common options available as well.
Take advantage of the free domain name most affordable web hosting companies will give you. They’ll use this domain name as the account name typically. You don’t have to use a free domain name. If you have one registered already, you can use that as the account identifier. Keep in mind that most of these affordable web hosts will allow you to have several domains per account, each pointing to their own directory. With this, you can solicit some business and host other websites on your own server. If you do this for a few dollars per month, you’ll be able to count this against your overall cost. Just an idea.
Creating a fully functional website these days is pretty easy. One of the easiest ways to do this is through Wordpress which is included in just about all of the cPanel software installation options. There are a lot of other options including ecommerce, content management systems, bulletin board systems, and a few other types of websites. All of these are pretty easy to install.
Getting setup with affordable web hosting has never been easier. This is a project that you can undertake quickly and easily. One recommendation I have is to not overanalyze these web hosting companies too much. I’d visit some web hosting forums and see what real people recommend.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.