Can Cheap Web Hosting be Good?

I have an interesting tea party yesterday with a few blogger-friends. Almost everyone was lamenting that their wallets were getting empty faster with the impact of rising fuel price.

One said he will have to cut down on smoking, which actually isn’t a bad idea. After all, he is literally spending money to burn his life away. Another said she intends to replace branded food items with no-frill house brands to trim down household expenses. The cost-cutting conversation then sparked an interesting debate about cheap web hosting.

Cheap does not equate to no good. If cheap goods do not serve their purposes, they will not survive in the competitive markets.

Many blogged free of charge using blogspot platform. If you do not need to own your own domain name, free space is great especially when it is Google who owns it.

Bloggers with their own domains are likely to pay the lowest hosting packages over the top of the range that promises unlimited bandwidth. After all, most of us don’t need more than 100 megabytes of space, the basic package will do.

Actually, whether cheap equates to no good is not important. In fact, price should not be the only factor to consider when buying something. When I bought hosting space for this blog, I wasn’t thinking of price. I’m more concerned with the service. I want this blog be supported 365/24/7. I surveyed a few sites to check if they provided 24-hour support and then proceeded onto checking the response rate by sending a ticket with a question and seeing how long it took for them to reply.

Then I went to a few blogger-friends’ site who had similar hosting companies to test the speed. If the web hosting company’s website loads slowly, yours will too if you pick that company to serve your website. Some web hosting companies reduce costs by putting everyone on the same server and same connection, causing heavy congestion of both the processor and data line, which results in longer load times for the website. This can be a huge turn-off for people who have no patience to wait more than 4-5 seconds for the website to complete downloading.

Next, I visited a few forums to check on the reviews other bloggers gave on these short-listed web hosting companies. In marketing, we always asked our loyal clients for a testimony. Testimony can outperform a paid advertisement anytime.What happens when Oprah Winfrey puts an unknown writer’s book on her Oprah’s Book Club? He is likely to be the best-selling writer overnight. The same principle holds true here. If everyone sings praises of a particular web hosting company, you are likely to get similar tip-top services.

Don’t simply pay for the most expensive product without some research- unless you buy-in to the snob appeal – because you never know if the expensive plans are backed by technically unsound morons. Similarly, don’t just snatch up the $2.99 deal either. Why?

1. Data Loss
When the servers fail, the worst nightmare any blogger can have is that the web hosting provider did not creates backups. This is worse if you do not back up your databases yourself.

2. Business Disasters
When your blog and website has a wonderful post and it draws in tens of thousands readers, you would not want the servers to break down. Even if it is only a few minutes, you stand to incur huge losses in terms of traffic, potential profit (from AdSense and affiliate programs) and good will.

3. Moving Costs
Moving your website can be a real pain. You need to download all the files you have along with the database and re-upload everything to the new server. It’s better to invest time to find a good web hosting company than waste such time.

For folks who are looking for answers if cheap web hosting are acceptable, you will do well to check out these web hosting articles. The last I saw, it has at least 22 articles on the topics.