Looking to establish a presence on the Internet? Whether a corporate/personal website, e-commerce site or blog, the two basic fundamentals that are needed and never change, are a domain name and a good web host. The former needs no explanation, the latter is a different story. We are a society currently living in the Wal-Mart era, where the lowest price wins. In the world of web hosting this mentality is generally the same. The sheep blindly follow the herd. Great brand marketing has not hurt the industry either i.e Godaddy. This leads me to the topic of budget hosting. Budget hosting is great for small, mom and pop type businesses which want to establish a web presence for very little investment. In other words, “You get what you pay for.”
The average “cheapo” budget hosting plan is $4.29/per month at Godaddy. That’s about the average price of a happy meal Godaddy is like the McDonalds of the internet, an affordable quick fix. There is nothing wrong with that if you are just starting out, but as your online presence grows, you will need to get more serious. As someone who works in the industry, I see and hear of these horrible experiences on a daily basis. Don’t be fooled by the myths and marketing.
Marketing - Marketing is betting on you being uneducated about your choice and glorifying an idea.
If you do nothing else, before you sign up for any unlimited plan, read the Terms of Service (TOS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Here you will find the limits. Typically there are limits on RAM usage or CPU usage. This is sensible for shared hosting. If you are on a shared host and one of your neighbors sites is getting hammered, you don’t want your site to suffer as a result. Most of the time this becomes a rude awakening right at the moment when you begin to reach success
24/7 Support - For approx four dollars a month, don’t expect 24/7 support. Can you afford for your business to be down for 24 hours+, waiting for an email response?
Disadvantages of budget and in general shared web hosting.
Slow over loaded servers: Given that a physical web server is shared, the amount of customers on one box can be any where from 500-1000+. Websites on a shared server will usually have slower server response times, then compared to a virtual private server or dedicated.
Reliability Issues: In most cases, web hosting providers may take care of the security and performance of the shared server. However, it may happen that some of websites hosted on the shared server run a malicious program or script or over-utilize the resources, can bring down the web server. Your website would suffer downtime and inaccessibility as a result.
Sharing Issues: You just need one “bad” website on your shared web server to get your website banned in a search engine due to shared IP address.
Security: Shared web hosting is more risky and opens up potential security issues and risks, as other web masters having an account on the same web server could possibly lead to your account being breached.
Processes/Ram: Usage are very real limits and you would be wise to investigate what these limits are before signing up.
What would YOU expect for four dollars a month? You would expect a promise or commitment made to be kept. Is it unrealistic to expect the best service at a bargain basement price? If you are told you are getting 24/7 support, and have paid what the host deems fair,then they had better deliver.
Advantages of budget and in general shared web hosting.
Efficiency: Today, shared web hosting service comes with web space and bandwidth that are more than sufficient for small business websites. However, you can always add more resources should you overrun the web space or bandwidth usage.
In closing, do your research when choosing a hosting company. If something sounds too good to be true, odds are it is.
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