How Much Should You Be Paying For Paid Hosting?

So you have decided to try out paid hosting after you found out that free hosting companies uptime and reliability sucks. But now you at a point where you’re clueless on how to go about getting paid hosting. Which one to choose, let alone get a quality one among the gazillion of offers out there?

Well let me be your personal guide. Firstly let me congratulate you on your wise decision as paid hosting is a stepping stone to something much bigger. May it be your personal project or your own business.

Let’s get down to the basic. For paid hosting you’re actually renting a ’space’ on the world wide web which runs on web servers. These web servers are actually computers, but of a different kind from your normal desktop PC.

It has more memory and power to withstand high load capacity from web user requests. These computers basically link and communicate with other computers on the Internet.

Now the basics are covered, the first thing on your mind would be how much should you be paying for paid hosting. I’ve seen prices as low as $0.99 per month to a few hundreds dollars.

The range can be wide and the difference is that the cheaper end of the scale are shared web hosting while the far end expensive of the scale are dedicated hosting.

Shared hosting are web servers with hundreds to thousands of websites on a single server. Some unscrupulous hosting companies stuff as many clients they can on one single server, that’s why you might find the price are rather dirt cheap. After awhile you’ll find your website really slow.

The middle range are the Virtual Private Hosting. Better than shared hosting but you still have limitations compared to the dedicated servers.

For dedicated server you’ll be getting your own rig and I.P. and most hosting companies have admin support on standby to fix and configure your servers if needed. It’s the best choice of hosting if you require loads of CPU usage, bandwidth and webspace.

Still it doesn’t mean shared web hosting is bad and you should stay away for it. For new small businesses or newbies I do recommend shared hosting. I recommend prices around $4.95 per month and above as a start.

For me I would usually read web hosting reviews to find companies with the best uptime and support. But be wary as some of the reviews are paid reviews, meaning hosting company pay these sites to give a positive reviews.

Another advice is to go to hosting forums. There you’ll find independent opinions on various web hosting companies. After awhile you’ll find a trend where most of these users recommend a few selected good web hosting companies.

Well Good Luck!