It’s pretty easy to sort through the chaff littering the internet to find a discount web hosting service which suits your needs and here’s how you go about it in a few easy steps:
- Reliability and speed of access of the budget web hosting service you have selected – Just imagine that it is a holiday and you are hawking something almost everyone is going to need this season as a gift. But what if your low cost web hosting service is having frequent downtime for maintenance! You could lose a lot of business and customers due maintenance problems with budget web hosting service. Please do check this out thoroughly. Hosting services that are frequently offline to do maintenance will make you lose a lot of customers as most customers have very little patience. Most of the time they find your site after doing extensive searches and when they click on it, if a maintenance message keeps popping up; you are guaranteed an irritated customer.
Some ways to avoid this:
Find out from previous customers about how long your low cost host goes offline and how often.
Get feedback from other people who have signed on with the same site provider.
Try to experiment with them for a few months and then if you aren’t satisfied just shift your site to another provider.
- CGI-BIN access / There are several free CGI hosting services present which provide web site visitor counters, search engines, polls, surveys, etc. You have no need to do the legwork by learning and tweaking the Perl or PHP scripts. But if you want to do it yourself with the PHP or CGI-BIN scripts then your budget web site hosting provider should be able to grant you access.
- Bandwidth allotment: Several budget web hosting services limit the amount of traffic your website can access per day and you might lose out on business due to this. If more than a set amount of visitors access your images and your content per month or per day, then low cost web hosting services are more than capable of billing you extra for the visitors or even disabling your services for a while. You can’t really select a set amount of bandwidth for your site but usually about 100 MB traffic per month is enough for a personal home page and you should have about 1-3 GB traffic per month for a simple starter site.
- Technical support of the web site: Most affordable web hosting services do not have technical support function 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If your budget web hosting service does not have technical support 24/7, on weekdays and holidays then you do need a better service.
