Choosing affordable hosting can be daunting. Due to the large number of web hosts on the internet today, selecting any hosting company, never mind an affordable one can be a nightmare. Do a search for "web hosting" with the quotes around the keywords on Google, and it'll return over 5 million! That doesn't mean there are 5 million web hosting providers but there very well could be at least 1 million! So you can see there are a lot of web hosts. How can you choose an affordable hosting company that will meets your needs? Affordable hosting is generally thought to be a hosting service that is below $10 per month, thus making it affordable to most people. Typically most companies offering affordable hosting only offer one year plans. Most affordable hosting companies tend to quote you the monthly fee you would pay if you divided the annual fee by 12 months. Bear this in mind when you are comparing one company with another. Another thing to check for is the setup fee. Do they charge you a setup fee to get started?
The first place to start evaluating affordable hosting companies is their own home page. This should give you an indication of their professionalism? How easy is it to find all of the information you are looking for? Make sure you have a look at their contact information. What information do they give? Do they list a physical address, an email address and a phone number to contact them? If they don't provide any contact details, do be careful. If you run into problems setting up your website, which does happen from time to time and you have no proper contact information, how are you going to get the problem resolved if you can not contact them? Does the affordable hosting company provide a free phone number for you to contact them? You don't want to be paying long distance call costs to them if you need to get them on the phone about a problem or concern you have. A free phone number also suggests their willingness to deal openly and honestly with their customers.
Choose an affordable hosting company that offers a good guarantee. Generally most affordable hosting companies don't openly publish their satisfaction guarantees. You have to do some digging and look in their terms of services agreement to find out what they do with regard to giving you back your money if you are not satisfied. If in doubt you should continue your search.
You have spent time and money getting your website ready. The last thing you want is for the affordable hosting to have long or many down times. So check what their uptime guarantee is, the guarantee refers to the amount of time the server is live and running your web pages. An uptime guarantee of 99% means that the host guarantees that their servers will be up and operational 99% of the time. Over the course of one year, 99% uptime would represent a downtime (the one percent) of around 87 hours in a year or an average of 7 hours per month. An uptime of 99.9% would involve only 8 hours of downtime for the entire year.
There are a lot more other factors you could consider, but one other really important one is after sale service. What kind of resources do they make accessible for you? Check out if the affordable hosting company offers free scripts. What type of marketing tools if any do they have and can make available to you? What kind of help for setting up your account can you expect from the affordable hosting company? It is crucial that all of these areas are taken into consideration.
Just because a company offers an affordable hosting service, doesn't mean you necessarily have to compromise on features, quality or service. All three will only be found, however, if you make sure to do your homework to find an affordable hosting company that is right for you and fulfils your needs.
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