Ever heard the saying "Penny-wise and Dollar-foolish"?
Well bargain priced website hosting may just represent the perfect example of watching a jar full of pennies while bucket loads of dollars fly out the window!
When I launched my first website (way back in the "dark ages" of 1997) I paid almost $150 a month in hosting and data transfer charges. My web host watched how many files I uploaded like a hawk and always seemed to send their hefty invoices earlier with each passing month.
I'm obviously not the only one who felt that way, because suddenly a whole industry of "bargain" web hosts sprang up all over the web.
On the surface they all sound great, especially when you think you can go from $150 a month down to $4.95 a month!
Five bucks a month sounds great, until you realize the amount of data transfer (number of page views) and bandwidth (the amount of data transfer your host allows in a given period) you get for that low price potentially hampers your ability to do business.
This realization - along with a panic attack and a quick lesson in calculating data transfer and bandwidth - usually comes at the least convenient time.
When you exceed your limits, a bargain host usually just shuts you down with no warning. Most webmasters realize they've made a mistake choosing a bargain host when their site suddenly
loads a blank page in the middle of a big promotion traffic spike.
Believe me, everything just stops!
Here are a few bargain hosts that provide good service, but you need to carefully check the fine print for how much bandwidth they allow.
www.FeaturePrice.com For about $24.95 a month you get to host up to six independent websites with a single account.
You get unlimited data storage, unlimited email and a variety of other higher end services, but their bandwidth policy seems hard to understand.
They did shut me down when we had a moderate level of success even though I paid them an extra $300 to get what they called "maximum" bandwidth. I was NOT pleased and promptly moved the
site to another host.
www.HostSave.com Host Save is another low price hosting company that delivers a wide range of services for only $6.95 per month. They recently raised their allowable data transfer, but their policy on how much bandwidth you can use at a given time seems non-existent.
www.DotEasy.com For $25 DotEasy offers a domain name purchase along with one year's hosting. Sounds incredible until you read the fine print to discover they limit you to 1 Gigabyte of data transfer a month. Not much data once you start getting reasonable site traffic.
The moral here?
Either prepare to have your business shut down mid-stream if you get successful, or pay a few extra bucks each month to ensure you have enough bandwidth and data transfer to operate
without any service interruptions.
At a minimum, specifically ask about and read the fine print regarding the host's policies before it's too late!
