Cheap Web Hosting Information
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Cheap web hosting is so common these days there is no reason for the typical web owner to pay more than $1-$10 monthly for full featured web hosting. You do need to do a little homework to confirm the host you decide to go with has the value, reliability, support and features you need to accomplish your online goals. These are the most important things to consider when deciding on a cheap monthly web host.Disk Space
How much space will you be needing depends on what type of site you have. If your site has a lot of images or multi media on it you will use a lot more disk space than a text based site. So if you are going to create an online photo gallery, entertainment or an e-commerce website with lot’s of product images, you’ll want to be aware of how much disk space the package allows. There are good packages out on the web for as low as $1.95 per month, which offer 100 MB of disk space. This could easily support hundreds of images.
Data Transfer
Data transfer is the amount of bytes transferred from your site to visitors while browsing. This is also known as "traffic" or "bandwidth". For most web sites you will not need much bandwidth. Most websites need less than 2GB of data transfer monthly. For example a web site getting 2000 visitors a month transferring pages with lots of images uses about 1.4 GB of data transfer monthly. If you intend to have a lot of downloads of software, audio or video, then you may end up using a lot more bandwidth, maybe 50 GB. Adult sites typically use a lot of bandwidth. Sites like mp3.com require an enormous amount of bandwidth, but for the average site - a low level will be enough in almost all cases. There are packages for as low as $6.95 that offer a whopping 250GB data transfer, more than enough for most websites.
Add On Domains
Say you launch a site that is really successful, you're getting plenty of traffic and sales and are making money. You may want to replicate the idea within that niche. An "Add On Domain" would allow you to host multiple sites on the same account. All you would do is purchase another domain name, and upload your files to a different folder within your account with the same hosting company. This is great for affiliate marketers because you wont need to pay for another hosting account if you suddenly get any idea for a profitable niche and want to quickly get a website up and running. Many cheap hosting companies offer this great feature.
Scripting
Depending on who is developing your site, script support is something you may need to consider. Many low cost hosts will support either ASP or PHP, but probably not both. A little planning is necessary to avoid problems, potentially big problems down the road! Make sure you check with whomever is developing the dynamic content for your website before you sign up with any host. What you'll want to know from the developer is what language they use for scripting dynamic content (usually ASP or PHP) and what kind of database they are using (MS Access, SQL, MySql etc..). Then decide on a host based on this. Believe me, this will prevent changing web hosting companies after the project is under way.
Nothing looks more unprofessional than a web site with an email address mapping to "soandso@aol.com" or "soandso@yahoo.com ". Most good web hosts offer email setup, which allows you to create an email, which matches the domain name. Even if you're a small company you definitely will need this to look professional. Look for ease of set up regarding this feature; most hosts allow you to create this once your control panel is established. The number of e-mail accounts varies between Low-cost hosts. If you have multi-departments in your organization for example, customer service, product sales or technical support, you may want to consider a host, which includes multi-email accounts. There web packages that offer 2500 email boxes for around 6.95 per month. Probably more than you’ll ever need.
Support
Make sure there is at least email support to report any issues that arise. I've found many low cost hosts with excellent e mail support for as little as $1.95 per month.
Find out about the cheapest high quality web hosting packages available on the web today. Cheap Web Hosting Information
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