Many people take cheap web hosting for granted, but there are many little known ways that budget web hosting saves you money. This is because by providing many customers with shared, virtual and dedicated hosting plans, they are not only able to offer all kinds of freebies that are cheaper to buy in volume, but they are also able to save you money in ways that you may not have thought of. Budget web hosting is a whole lot more cost-saving than just the free advertising credits and the domain name they throw in when you sign up for your hosting account. Contrary to popular belief, there are quite a few more ways that a budget web hosting company saves you money than you might think.
The first thing that a cheap web hosting company saves you money on is the most important thing of all – the server. Whether you sign up for shared hosting, virtual private server hosting, or dedicated hosting, the server is the computer where your web site resides and is provided at very little cost to you. If you think about it, the cost, time, and knowledge needed to set up your own server would be staggering. First, you would have to go buy the computer. Then, you would have to configure an operating system. In case you didn’t know, an operating system is all the software that you would need to turn a separate computer into a server. Of course, if you wanted Linux or UNIX hosting, you would have to track down all of the software for the operating system as well. It would be free, but you would still have to know how to install it. That might be better than a Windows hosting environment, which is easier to set up, but then would cost you all of the money for Internet Information Server as well as ASP and ASP.NET. The price on those three applications alone can be very expensive for one person. You would also have to figure out what kind of Internet security you would want to place on your server, which would have to equal what security that the hosting companies provide. This is because, unless you are very up on anti-virus protection, your site and your server will probably get hit and taken out by some kind of debilitating virus.
A budget web hosting company saves you money on software as well. One of the main elements that new web developers take for granted is the free control panel. Whether it is a control panel that was developed by an individual hosting company or something more universal, like the cPanel, these web administration interfaces cost money and are certainly not free. They either cost money to develop or to license, and without them, you would not be able to operate your web site. If you wanted to develop a control panel yourself, you would definitely have to take some college-level computer classes.
As software goes, the free site builder is a little more obvious in the way that it saves you money; in the fact that if you don’t know how to build a web site, you would have to purchase it from somewhere else if it wasn’t offered in your hosting package. Some free site builders are cheap and some (like FrontPage) are a more expensive, but if you use the free site builder your hosting company gives you, it saves you the hassle of getting a third party site builder to work with your hosting company’s operating system, which may be a problem in and of itself. This is because there is always room for human error when computer techs set up a hosting company’s operating system. There is also no way for the techs to anticipate every software program that you, the customer, might want to use on the hosting company’s operating system. So, any time you introduce third party software like a site builder, you are taking the risk that it might not be compatible with your web hosting company’s operating system. By providing you with a free site builder, they are not just giving you free software; the web hosting company is giving you software that is configured to work with their operating system. Along with a control panel that works with the sitebuilder and the operating system, the hosting company is saving you an amount of time and money that is quite substantial if you are new to web hosting.
The same goes when they offer you free FTP, PHP, MySQL, Fantastico, Python, Ruby on Rails, CGI, Pear and any other scripts that have to do with creating dynamic web applications on your site. Not only are all these scripts put right together in one hosting package so you don’t have to hunt them down, they are all configured to be compatible. This is good news, because if a hosting company offers these applications in your hosting package, they have to guarantee that they work. If you have problems with any software included in your hosting package, you can call customer service and hopefully get the problems resolved. Not so with third party scripts. For example, even if a hosting company has FrontPage extensions, they will not guarantee that it will support your version or copy of FrontPage. You can get upset all you want, but you are much better off if you take advantage of the convenience and savings of software supplied by your hosting company.
Customer support at budget web hosting companies can also save you quite a bit of money in the education department. Many web developers have college degrees in some kind of computer science, or at least some continuing education in this field. If you are lost when it come to web development, some of the customer support reps can give you information that will point you in the right direction, or give you web sites where you can go learn about web applications. As well, many cheap web hosting companies provide customer forums and chat rooms where you can get all kinds of web development questions answered. There are also a lot of web masters out there who give out lots of free advice to boost the rankings of their own web sites. Take advantage of the free education; and if you are diligent, you can walk away with computer training that is similar to a college degree in web development or Internet marketing.
Speaking of Internet marketing, your web hosting company can save you money there as well. The obvious savings are the free advertising credits that you get, but hosting companies also offer free search engine submission and some other free Internet marketing advice and tools. The little known way that budget web hosting companies really help you though, is with free and unlimited subdomains. A subdomain is a domain in its own right, but it is an extension of your domain as well. If your main domain name was ‘yourdomainname.com’, then its subdomains could be ‘its.yourdomainname.com’ and ‘that’s.yourdomainname.com.’ Each subdomain can be developed just like your original site and you can get ranked for different keywords and different content. If done correctly, subdomains can be a real boost to your website rankings, and it’s all provided free by your budget web hosting company.
Also, if you have an ecommerce site that takes payments by credit card you will need an SSL certificate. Usually this is something you have to pay for and renew every year, but many web hosting companies will give you a free shared SSL certificate. Technically, a shared SSL certificate covers the entire server where you web site files are stored, so it doesn’t hold as much clout as an individual SSL certificate, but it works for the purposes of a small ecommerce site on a shared hosting plan. Without it, banks won’t let you accept credit cards as a form of payment. A shared SSL certificate may not give your customers any added confidence, but the banks will accept it and it save you the yearly cost of buying one yourself.
Some hosting companies will also give you a free billing system. This is a system that keeps track of what your customers owe you and sends automated monthly invoices, monthly reminders, and cut-off notices to them. This software in invaluable if you run a service-oriented company like a reseller program where you sell Internet packages yourself. Many small business owners don’t understand how time consuming it can be to track customers down and make sure they pay for services every month until they actually have to do it themselves. This is one free software feature that more than pays for itself if you own an ecommerce business.
If you think about it, there are many different and little known ways that a budget web hosting company can save you money. Even just something like keeping Windows software current is something that you probably wouldn’t want to pay for on your own. There are a lot of other ways that these hosting companies save you money as well, especially if you are just paying $4.95 a month for a hosting plan. In fact, it would actually be impossible for you to get any of these services together for that little amount of money on your own. Low cost web hosting companies are far from being perfect, but if you think about all of the services they offer, their prices are actually very inexpensive.
