Survey First Before Choosing a Cheap Web Hosting Provider
I said recently that cheap web hosting can be good but one got to be discerning. I checked 3 things before I settled with my current web hosting provider:
-
- The response rate of the short-listed web hosting provider by sending a ticket with a question.
-
- A few blogger-friends’ sites who had similar hosting companies to test the speed.
-
- Online reviews.
I received a short email from yesterday inquiring which site I used for my research. That’s a tough question because there are simply too many sites reviewing web hosting providers. However, I used Web Hosting Geeks for independent review of the top ten cheap professional web hosting services under $10 a month. Currently, it listed BlueHost at the pinnacle of its Top 10 Best Web Hosts, 2008. BlueHost received a very positive overall review of 98% with “Reliability & Uptime” at an impressive 99%. Still, when I clicked on customer reviews, I found extreme opinions on BlueHost’s technical and customer support. Many reviewers gave it a one-star while a few bestowed the ultimate 5-star salute.
What does it mean? Simply that we must know what we can expect from the web hosting companies. If others received excellent or lousy treatment from a particular company, the chances that we shared the same fate are pretty high. However, more importantly, we must know what are the supports we are looking for. To illustrate, if you are running a simple website or a blog with plenty of text and a few static images here and there, I don’t see why you need to pay extra dollars for unlimited hosting space and all those freebies they threw in as baits. If you are selling adult products, it’s best that you go to hunt for that hard-to-find terms of service document to see if the web hosting providers prohibit or strongly discourage the use of foul languages, nudity, sex and so on.
If you are looking for cheap web hosting, you can look under it’s web hosting awards for more information on
- Best Budget Hosting
- Best Blog Hosting
- Best Forum Hosting
- Best Unix Hosting
- Best Windows Hosting
- Best PHP Hosting
- Best Email Hosting
- Best ecommerce Hosting
- Best Multi-Domain Hosting
- Best VPS Hosting
- Best Reseller Hosting
- Best Dedicated Hosting
Well, Ja, I hope the above will answer your question. I thought I put my feedback up as a post to share with more people.
Read related post on cheap web hosting at this blog:
Can Cheap Web Hosting be Good?
[tags]cheap web hosting[/tags]
5 Replies to “Survey First Before Choosing a Cheap Web Hosting Provider”
Great post, and I agree completely. Cheap web hosting can be great if you have limited requirements. However, finding the right cheap web host is much easier said than done…you don’t really know what you’re going to get until you sign up.
But, you can prepare yourself as much as possible by following the advice you provided. Great post! Thanks!
Thanks for your thoughts, Erika. As one of my mentors used to say: “Consider you are in good hands if you can get 2 out of 3of Good, Fast and Cheap”.
I agree with you as regards to Bluehost, they dont tell you the website that you painstakingly design can only be used with them, if you want to leave Bluehost you have to re-design all over again,and as for Fasthosts i took a free trial cancelled it after the first day and have been plagued with their e-mails eversince,