How to Select Good and Cheap Web Hosting Package? - An important consideration to start home based business online.

You might have heard advices saying that you need to pay more to get a high quality business web hosting. That is not true. Cheap web hosting package does not mean low quality. With the right guide and tips, you can get as low cost as $3.95/month with tip-top quality products and services. This article will lead you how to select a reliable and cheap web hosting package.

A Word on Free Web Hosting
Using free web hosting is ideal if your web site is meant for hobby or other non-profit purposes. However, if it is meant to start home based business, you should get your own domain and have full control on it. For more details, please read article : What is Free Web Site? ¡V The Free Web Site background .


Important considerations when selecting web hosting provider.
(Remember, getting cheap web hosting package does not need to compromise on its quality.)

Reliability
You should expect your web site to be up at all time. Down time should be a rare occasion. Technically, it should be up at least 99% of the time. Frequent or prolong down time could be harmful to your web site in a few ways.
- Search engines do not like lost links. They are likely to panelize those sites which contain loss links. The implication is that those sites that provides back links to you may suffer if your site is down often. Thus, many established web sites, and web directories would install link checker software to auto-check whether the sites they link out are still valid. If your site is down for a period of time, it can be interpreted as your site no longer exists and the link will be removed. Thus, you can loss your back links.
- You may loss loyal visitors who bookmarked your page. They may remove the bookmark.
- It will leave a bad image to your potential customers. They will loss confidence in your site if they always encounter site-not-found problem.

Speed
Online visitors are not very patient. If your web site is loading slowly, they will just leave.
Cheap web hosting packages normally come with shared server and on tier-1 connection. However, they may not be slow. It depends on the server¡¦s speed and how heavy it is loaded. Some hosting companies provide multiple servers with Load Balancing System. Its speed could be comparable with the dedicated server. So, look out for these features.


Security
Look out for the security features the hosting company provides. Good web hosting providers should help to protect your site from virus or spammers attacks. You should expect features such as Firewall protection and Spam Assassin are included free of charge.
Some web hosting providers also provide free backup facility for you to backup your sites, which is very desirable.


Capacity
You should consider the capacity given by the plan before you sign up. Features relating to capacity are:
- Disk Space
- Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
- Number of sub-domains
- Number of File Transfer (FTP) Accounts
- Number of Domains (with dedicated IP Addresses)
Sufficient capacity enable you to develop many web sites by a single plan or even function as a host for a free-web-hosting site.
It is essisental important to consider all these features together as a group. (Be aware of some tricks web hosting provider use. For instance, they may offer you with many or even unlimited sub-domains but do not give you enough Disk Space or Bandwidth to support the volume and the traffic. You may end up having to buy additional Space or Bandwidth from them which can cost you dearly.)

- Disk space
Unless your web site requires big, complicated graphics or animations that take up a lot of spaces, usually a few megabytes will be enough to set up... However, to create more web sites using sub-domains, space requirements will need to multiply accordingly.

- Data Transfer (Traffic/Bandwidth)
Data Transfer represents the amount of data can be transfer to and from the hosting server per month. If you web page take 1 megabyte space, and you have got 100 visitors (ie. 100 times of downloading your page) in a month, you would have used 100 megabytes of Data Transfer.
This is important. The success of your web site depends on the popularity and the volume of your visitors. If your traffic exceeded your bandwidth, your web hosting provider will ask you to buy extra bandwidth, or you will face the consequences of having your site brought down.
You should expect at least 10GB of bandwidth to give allowance for future grow. Do not believe in ¡§unlimited data transfer¡¨ promises! Web hosting providers have to pay for it. There were cases reported that some webmasters got charged for being exceeding the ¡§unlimited bandwidth¡¨ usage. There is always catches somewhere to hidden their charges. So, to avoid the hidden cost, do not follow the ¡§unlimited¡¨ promises.
You need to consider the Bandwidth needs especially if you are planning to share your host plan with a group of people.

- Number of sub-domains
Sub-domain works like an independent web site. The difference is that it does not have its own IP address. To the search engine, this site belongs to the registered domain site with the dedicated IP address.

- Number of File Transfer (FTP) Accounts
Having FTP Access enables you to transfer files in and out of your web site easily. You can also build your web site with your own site builder software and publish it thru FTP access.
Some web hosting providers also provide you with multiple FTP Accounts. You can create FTP Accounts; assign them to different persons, with the access to different directories or sub-domains. With these features, your family members or friends to build their web sites under your account without extra charge. You can also run your web site as a Free-Web-Hosting provider.

- Number of Domains (with dedicated IP Addresses) hosting in a package
Some web hosting providers offer plans with multiple domains (with dedicated IP addresses). This can really save cost thru economics of scale. One strategy to promote web site is to build multiple sites and interlinks them. If the IP Address is different, search engines will consider the links as external back links. (Be aware of some hosting promises with multiple domains but only allow 1 dedicated IP Address. Those are not real domains since search engines recognize web sites by the IP Addresses.)


Technical Support
It should be 24/7. Mode of support at least should have Toll Free Phone Line and the Ticket Logging System. More ideally if they have Live Chat System. Personally I find Live Chat most helpful. International toll free line support is required if you are located outside the hosting country (usually means outside USA).

How established is the Web Hosting Provider
This is another important consideration. Competition in the hosting business is very fierce. If hosting companies can¡¦t make profit, they are likely to close down within first 3 years. Web sites that hosted with them will also disappear with them. Check to ensure the web hosting provider is established for more than 3 years (or better still, 5 years) will lower this risk.


Other Facilities
Following are some other handy facilities to look out for:

- Email facilities
You should be given the access to create your email accounts under your domain name, such as yourname@yourdomain.com. Helpful email facilities include Auto-Responder (to automatically reply emails to the senders.) and catch-all (to receive all messages to your domain with non-valid accounts.) etc.

- Site Builder
A free and easy-to-use site builder will be very helpful if you are not familiar with web site building.

Follow the above guideline and put in some efforts to search, you will be able to find some high quality and affordable web hosting providers. I strongly suggest you also read my article on hosting review and recommendation :
Web Hosting Review. It will save you some time of searching or at least you can make comparison with the hosting packages you find.


* Copyright 2007 by Jonah Leow, tophomebusinessprograms.com. All rights reserved. You may publish the article provided you retain its full content including the links.