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Watch out for those CHEAP web hosting companies $1.95, you've seen em...... |
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 Cheap web hosting will usually reflect poorly on your business, not initially as the appearances are cosmetic, but it will always come back to haunt you and more importantly embarrassing your company image.
So the customer won't know your hosting on the cheap huh?
All web hosting companies start out equal, reduced price equate to reduced service, even when touting 24/7 customer service you need to think about the term "customer service" that doesn't mean "technical support"! and the two are definitely different.
One of the things we look for in a web hosting company is RELABILITY first, then price second , the major concern for us and our clients is stability and reliability, no sense in having a presence on the internet if the server continually is down or the server load is high.
We have come up with some reasons and questions for why affordable web hosting is different than cheap web hosting and what would be better for you. |
Dazzle and confuse!!!
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 Web hosting companies will try to dazzle and confuse you. your getting so much cool stuff! Unless your the person responsible for creating and maintaining the site, its all greek.
Clarification on some of the terminology used should help you understand what there selling you.
Domain names - can't have a web site without one, well you can if its just email your after, but you still need a web host to host the DNS so the internet know where the domain name lives. names are relatively cheap depending on where yo buy it, this is definitely a same product absolutely no difference except for where you buy it, and how much your paying for it.. |
Email addresses - this is a no brainer, should be unlimited and FREE
Disk space - this is dependent on your content and how many pages you intent on having, a little math lesson on this, an average page size is just 50KB with little to no images on it, so as you can see from the math small sites really don't require allot of space or bandwidth.
- Bit= Really small
- 8 bits is 1 Byte
- 1024 Bytes = 1 Kilobyte (KB)
- 1024 KB = 1 Megabyte (MB)
- 1024 MB = 1 Gigabyte (GB or Gig)
- 1024 GB = 1 Terabyte, and anything over this is really reserved for web hosts or others requiring a TON of space or bandwidth
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Bandwidth. - is based on the same simple space idea except it measures how much data is transferred from your site to the internet, allot of hits and page requests would mean more bandwidth. is needed, so small web sites will use very little bandwidth. (the reason they can oversell accounts - no one is using it anyway but when you do everyone on that server will be affected).
Unix or Windows - Who cares? well it is important but not at the price decision, that decision should be on your web designer since he will need specific options available on one or the other platforms.
All the rest is useless information, only really required by the designer of the web site, things like cgi and php and blah blah blah are there to confuse you with all the options available that you probable don't even need to know.
- Depending on the size of your web site, pages you will need may not be a very big issue, so for a site with just 5 pages, it's more than enough reason to stay on a cheap host, if you intend to grow than automatically the option should be to a more stable and reliable host charging a mid range price, 7 - 10 dollars.
- If you plan on adding video and music to a web site then its even more reason to move to a larger space and less oversold server, unfortunately your going to have to move to a more pricey plan, something in the 10 - 15 dollar range. there really is no way to confidently predict the traffic you will receive unless its already an established web site
- Realize that cheap hosting companies will advertise a lot of space and bandwidth. on your plan, but the reality is that if you do use it they will probably cut off your account or ask you to move to a more expensive plan, why would they do that you ask? well simple, they over sell there space on the server! ever get canceled after having a car accident? your costing them money, they want paying customers that don't use anything.
- Mid priced web hosts will usually always have unlimited email accounts, for example cheap web hosts want to charge for something that is usually FREE everywhere else.
- If the intent is to have a web presence for your business then a mid priced web host is definitely the cheapest you should go, you will need a good backbone (not oversold) remember when AOL and some of the other companies were selling more accounts in the dial up days than they had phone lines for? that's the same thing as overselling space on a web hosts server.
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Read the Options and Fine Print |
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Unlimited is really limited to a magic number they only know..
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All of your bandwidth/space usage is unlimited unless you exceed or start causing server loads (because they oversold it).
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This is a HUGE one!! be careful that you always have COMPLETE control of your domain name. example (****** will remain administrative and technical contact on all web hosting accounts unless you request otherwise. - This means that this host would own your domain name, even though they require you to pay for it, unless you have read the small print and specifically requested otherwise).
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