Affordable Web Hosting Service

When I was only starting my online business endeavor, money was tight. However, I had to pay for a lot of things to get my business up and running. Many of those payments were recurring, including domain names and web hosting. So in order to save money on my business start up, I looked for the best and affordable web hosting service out there that I could afford to pay for the monthly fee. I found many web hosting companies that offered this service for very cheap but I had no way of telling whether the quality of their service was actually good. Unfortunately these cheap services do not have enough customer reviews that I could refer to.

So the first time I worked with a web hosting company, I chose one that sounded like “cheapest web hosting dot com” or dot net or something like that; I don’t quite remember exactly. After a few months I started having problems with my hosting and every time I contacted the support for help, they took their sweet time to get back to me.

But that was over 5 years ago. Today, web hosting services are getting cheaper and cheaper while the quality is also maintained and even improved. Currently you can see a lot of big web hosting companies slashing their monthly fees to less than $5 per month. However, when finding a web hosting service, from my past experience, obviously affordability is not the only factor that you should consider when signing up for a service.

Assess Your Needs

The only way for you to determine which web hosting service works for you is to know exactly what you need. Depending on what kind of website you are going to host, your web hosting criteria for a personal blog will be very different from a huge social network website. Ideally, you should also carefully take into consideration what other websites you would want to host there.

Also, you might want to check the capacity for a variety of scripts available at the hosting company.

Reliability and Speed

My bad experience with the first web hosting company that I had in the past was about their reliability. Although I did not seem to have any problems with the speed, my website was down very often. The best hosting services offer 99% uptime. You will see a lot of web hosting companies that claim this but it is always good to check for customer reviews to see whether their claim is true.

Bandwith and Disk Space

As my website grew, I needed more disk space. Today, there are a lot of web hosting companies that offer unlimited disk space. Also, bandwidth requirements grow with your site. As web hosting companies pay for bandwidth, bandwidth users will be billed accordingly. It is always best to know what kind of bandwidth limit your hosting provider offers you. You do not want to get a surprise bill for having gone way over your limit.

Customer and Technical Support

Personally for me, great Customer and Technical Support is the most important factor. I usually send them a pre-sale inquiry email just to see how long it takes for them to respond to my email. Good customer support would usually not take longer than 24 hours to get back to you. For Technical Support, you would want to make sure that they are available 24/7.

To learn more about web hosting services and what to look for to find the best one, go to Web Hosting Tutorial.