Normally you don’t expect ‘top quality’ from something described as ‘cheap’, the phrase ‘you get what you pay for’ springs to mind. But is that true of cheap web hosting?
In our experience there are some fantastic cheap web hosts available today, which provide a far higher level of service than more expensive hosts which you’d expect a more advanced product from.
The web hosting industry contains many large, public listed web hosting companies that can afford to offer low prices to their customers. This is thanks to economies of scale and the fact that they want to keep you as a happy paying customer for many years to be able to make their money back. It is also common for hosting customers to pay a small amount for their actual hosting plan, but then buy many add-ons products bringing the total value of the customer up. Taking this into account, we can say cheap doesn’t always mean bad, but how can we tell the large companies from the poor quality, cheap web hosts?
You can’t ever do enough research when planning to invest your website in a company so we’d always recommend starting there. Another good indicator is checking out a host’s costs for additional services. Some low cost web hosts will lure you in with their cheap hosting costs, then charge you for everything on the next page! This can include domain names, website builder tools, email addresses and even technical support.
All web hosting services will be recurring subscriptions so it’s advisable to check out the renewal price you will be paying next term. Some web hosting providers might appear to be the cheapest when you initially sign up, but when your account comes to renew in 12 or 24 months you may be paying a lot more and you’d have been better off with a different host.
There’s little point in saving $1/month choosing the cheapest hosting plan you can find, then your website experiences high downtime and ends up costing you more money due to loss of sales. Make sure your host is reputable and has a well publicised 99.9% uptime guarantee.
It’s common to receive a free domain name with your hosting subscription nowadays, but there are a few hosts who still don’t offer it. Make sure you check each considered web host’s feature pages and that they do include a free domain in their plans otherwise you could end up paying more overall with your domain purchase and renewal costs.
So which ‘Cheap Web Hosts’ are safe options and would you recommend?
We recommend HostPlus.com, iPage.com and HostPapa.com as the best low cost hosting solutions. They all fall into the category of large corporate organizations who can afford to offer their services cheaper thanks to economies of scales. These guys have the best reliability and features.