Cheap Hosting Space - 6 Things to Look Out For

So, you’ve decided to make a website, you want some cheap hosting space and you have no idea where to start. No problem! It is no where near as overwhelming as you think. Just like anything that’s new, there will be a slight learning curve. Things always go easier though when you’ve got someone showing you the right path to take. Hopefully, I can help you avoid some of the common traps people fall for when getting their first web host. Below is a list of 6 things to look out for.

Tech Support — Your number one concern.

This is the number one thing to look out for and I can’t stress this enough! No matter how many features or things you are promised, if you can’t get any of them to work you’re stuck. You can read reviews about how the tech support will be. Just Google the name of the company you are curious about with the word ‘review’ after it. Remember one thing though, no hosting company is perfect. Overall though the reviews should be good and if they aren’t move on to another company.

TIP: Call the hosting company before you sign up and don’t pick the number for new customers, instead work your way through the automated system to the tech support and ask some basic questions. Did they answer the phone quickly? How nice and willing to help were they? Instead of a review, you are getting first hand experience of their tech support without the commitment of signing up.

Reliability — 99.9% — Everyone claims to have it, but what does it mean?

It means that over the course of 12 months your website would be down for 9 hours or .001 percent. All companies strive for 100 percent and 99.9 is about as good as it gets. Companies would be crazy to guarantee 100 percent up time. Most people say that reliability is the number one thing when looking for hosting space. I disagree; tech support is number one for me. Remember, eventually there will be a problem and when that happens I don’t care about statistics, I care about customer and tech support.

Advertising – Cheap can mean free and free usually means advertisements.

If you are looking for cheap hosting space you do have the option of picking from any of the companies that offer free hosting space. The biggest downside to this approach is you will most likely have advertisements on your website that you can’t control. If you are a business or serious about having a website, avoid the temptation of the free web hosts.

Amount of Space — Is unlimited really unlimited?

Nobody will come out and say it, but after a lot of search I’ve found that unlimited really means 30-50GB’s of data and that has to be “related” to your website. That means no backing up your iTunes library. Most people get sucked into needing all this space when in reality, you need very little. I currently run 5 websites with a total combined usage of under 300MB.

File Size Limits — That one file is how big?

This is the size on any one file. Most web hosts don’t mention any file size limits in their marketing material. The file size limit may be different depending on how you are uploading the file. If you are uploading the file over FTP then there is usually no limit set. If you are using some software they provide to build your website it most likely will be limited at 10-15MB. This is another issue that most people won’t run into any problems on, but it’s good to be aware of. If you are overly concerned about this it’s best to give the hosting space provider a call and ask. They’ll be happy to help.

Bandwidth / Traffic — Like web space is it really unlimited?

Not a chance. Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred to or from your website. That’s a very basic and simplified definition, but it gives you a general idea. Bandwidth isn’t really what a lot of cheap hosting space providers are worried about; it’s the strain that the traffic puts on the web server your site is running on. If you get a huge jump in the number of people coming to your site the web server has to work harder to serve all that traffic, while still servicing everyone else on that server. If your traffic starts to effect the other people on the server the web host might temporarily shut your site down. Not because of too much bandwidth, but because of the strain on the server. If you are running into this problem you are most likely ready to upgrade to a larger hosting plan or a dedicated server solution.

Hopefully these 6 tips will get you started. This is just the beginning though, I could just as easily have written another 10 or some more tips about things such as domain names, email, the control panel, shopping carts, etc. If nothing else remember that almost every cheap hosting space company has a 30 day money back guarantee so you aren’t locked in if you find out you made a mistake.

Paul Bomers has tried almost every cheap hosting space company out there and has a website with a table showing reviews of all the cheap hosting space companies.