Cheap Web Hosting
What you get when you buy a cheap web hosting package.
In the last couple of years, the web hosting landscape has changed dramatically. Cheap web hosting providers can offer you almost anything a more expensive web hosting provider offers, ... except support.
A few years ago, hardware and network expenses were still a major cost for a cheap web hosting providers and they tried to compete by offering you more disk space and monthly bandwidth allowances for your web site. Of course, they could only do that by having less support staff, but that is not easily visible to a prospective buyer of a domain and web hosting.
How reliable are cheap web hosting providers.
Unless you are hosting a web site that is making hundreds of dollars a day, reliability of your cheap web hosting provider is no longer a big issue. I have hosted my sites with several good and bad cheap web hosting providers and over the years I have never had one that was down for more than a few hours in a year. The reliability of computers has improved so much that most of the down-time is planned downtime, i.e when they need to do some maintenance to their web servers. So, although most cheap web hosting providers still boast about their up-time this is, in general, no longer a big issue.
Once in a blue moon, however, something may go wrong with your web site. And, although that may be caused by a simple problem, you will need to depend on someone noticing your site is down, and then a you have to rely on support staff to quickly identify and solve that problem. So, it is important that you have web monitoring program or service that regularly checks your web site. And, you will need to pay enough for your web hosting, to enable your hosting provider to hire enough capable support staff.
What do you get with a really cheap web hosting package.
This webmaster guides web site is hosted by one of the most reliable and cheapest web hosts that I could find (And I tried a few). I highly recommend Dot5hosting if you insist on only paying about $5 dollar per month for your web hosting. And that includes one free domain name and for a mere $7.95 a year per domain you can host up to 5 additional domains. You'll certainly have enough disk space and bandwidth allowance to host 6 web sites. That's less than $1 per site.
However, you cannot expect optimum support if you pay a mere $5 per month for your cheap hosting package. The current minimum monthly hosting price that will allow a cheap web hosting provider to give you excellent support is about $7 to $8 dollars. If you pay more, and you do not get extra features that you really need in your cheap web hosting package, you are simply paying too much! But, if you are paying less your cheap web hosting provider is missing an extra $1000 to $2000 per month per 1000 visitors that they could have used for an extra support person.
The best cheap web hosting package.
If you pay about $6.95 per month you can get a superb cheap web hosting provider. And, really, what can you do nowadays with $7. A cup of coffee with cake? Well worth spending that on quality hosting for your web site. And, if you think that is too expensive just start a second web site. But, of course, the extra $2 dollars a month you pay more compared to the cheapest web hosting providers, does not necessarily give you better support. Unless you follow my recommendation. Sign up with Lunarpages! As a beginning webmaster, you'll need the extra support Lunarpages gives its customers. Their support is simply the best and the fastest support I ever experienced.