Cheap Webhosting Finder

There are many webhosting providers out there, all claiming to be the best and the cheapest. This brings up the question, how do you find the best one for you?

One of the best ways is to look at user reviews of the service, the more reviews that are available, the better. It is important to be wary of reviews written by webhosting services but disguised as being written by users, as these are more common than you might think these days.

Here is an example of 2 typical webhosting providers, and the features that they offer:

Webhost A

• Unlimited Webspace
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• PHP, CGI and Perl
• Live Chat Support
• Telephone Support

Webhost B

• 1500MB Webspace
• 10GB Bandwidth
• PHP, CGI and Perl
• Email Support
• Telephone Support

At first glance, most people would probably choose Webhost A because they offer unlimited webspace and bandwidth. What most people don’t realise is that this only means unlimited within the resources of that hosting service.

For example, a typical webhosting service may have 100GB of webspace and 1TB of bandwidth to allocate between all of their users. If for example, they have maybe 3000 users on one server and all of them decide to exceed 35MB, then the server will report the disk as being full, which would mean that such space could not possibly be considered truly unlimited.

Webhost B, however, claims to offer a set amount of webspace and bandwidth to its users, which means that users know how much of the webhost’s total resources they can use and that the webhost themselves can effectively plan how many servers they need etc.

This would allow Webhost B to provide a much better service than Webhost A. The above comparison chart applies to both free and paid webhosting services, especially the paid ones as any company offering a set amount of space to users, and charging them for it, would have to provide that amount of space, meaning that they would have to increase their amount of resources should they run out.

Whether free or paid hosting is the best solution depends on the website you want to build, and how much traffic is anticipated to it. It also depends on whether your site is of a personal or business nature. Business sites should always be hosted on paid services, as they have to guarantee what they are claiming to offer, or risk being in breach of contract.

This means that, if this advice is followed, business sites should only have a very minimal, if any, amount of downtime. Personal sites on the other hand, are, in most cases, probably better on free service providers. This is mainly due to the fact that uptime of such sites is not usually critical, i.e. you would not lose money if there was some downtime.

The one exception to this however, is if the site has paid advertising or affiliate links on it.In this situation, sites should almost always be on paid services, as downtime would mean losing money.

Also, especially with business sites / personal sites that have money making potential, it is usually a good idea to have your own domain name, so that if for some reason you need to change webhosting services, you would not need to inform all site visitors of a change of web address.