Cheap Web Package Hosting - How to Minimize CostsWritten by Brian Thorn
There are several steps you can take to help minimize costs with a web hosting package. Some require some effort on your part while others are simply a matter of common sense. No matter what your particular needs are, you'll likely find that there are companies out there offering web hosting with those needs in mind.The first and arguably most important step as you seek to minimize costs with a web hosting package is to shop around. Comparison shopping is always a good way to save money, and finding a good service for your web hosting needs is no exception. Online searches are probably your best bet for finding those great deals on web hosting, but don't give in to temptation to simply pick a company from a list of hits and sign on dotted line. Instead, take time to compare services, prices and reputations of various companies. Finding service provider that offers best bottom-line price for web hosting might not be provider that saves you most money. Especially if you aren't computer savvy, one way to minimize costs with a web hosting package is to find a company that offers free setup. While this is a fairly common part of web hosting for most companies at this point, you should be sure what it's going to cost you to establish account. If you find a company that offers a great bottom-line price but has you pay an enormous fee up front to establish service, it will probably take you a long time to recoup that fee in your monthly savings. By same token, finding a company that promises no fee to set up service but then charges a significantly more expensive monthly fee to maintain service isn't really going to save you any money either. If you want to minimize costs with a web hosting package, look for a happy medium between two - a service provider that establishes service for free and offers a reasonable monthly rate for maintaining service.
| | What to Look for in a Web HostWritten by Tim Frady
The first questions you have to ask yourself are: how much space and bandwidth do I need; do I want one site or several sites; how much will I have to spend; am I going to use an SQL database; how much uptime does web host offer; does this site host spammy adult sites; what extras are offered; are there script limitations; do they provide a control panel; and if my site gets too big, what is next level and how much does it cost? Let's take bandwidth for instance. If you are starting a brand new site and don't have a lot of other sites to link to it, which, by way, is becoming increasingly less efficient due to changing search engine rules, it may take over a year to build any real traffic to even worry about this point. But, with bandwidth being a lot more reasonable lately, why not go ahead and pay 6-10 dollars a month for 1 - 4 gigabytes currently available. After all, your goal is to grow right? So get something a few sizes too big and grow into it. Don't think that you necessarily have to pay a lot of money to get a good web host. You could just as easily spend 20 dollars or more a month and have terrible uptime and any number of hassles. Now if your site is going to be filled with images, especially wallpaper size images, then get as much bandwidth as your budget will allow. If you plan on having a growing site and it becomes even moderately popular, you'll need all bandwidth traffic allowable you can get. Watch out for hosts that claim they have unmetered bandwidth. Read carefully, especially if we're talking about a host that charges below 5 dollars a month. It's better to have a clear number that you can keep track of in your control panel. You don't won't them to come up and give you a generic excuse like "Your site is using an unfair amount of system resources or traffic as compared to our other customers so therefore we have to shut you down". Please note that system resources and bandwidth are two different issues when dealing with a web host. For instance a script that locks up and has a bug could cause a server to use a great deal of system resources that could cause problems between you and your web host if you are on a shared account versus a dedicated server. So do your research on type of script you want to run. Bandwidth is amount of traffic going out from your site including your images, clips, pages, etc. As far as images, sounds, and clips this is easily monitored in your control panel as long as you have a clear number of what you are allowed to use. Unmetered bandwidth could mean anything and really is worthless in long run if you plan on getting a lot of traffic sometime in future. And why wouldn't you want to get as much traffic as possible for your site?
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