Important facts about finding affordable web hosting
Space
Presented as Web Space, Disk space or Storage, is the amount of information you can upload to your web hosting account. You can fit more information on a CD than on an floppy disc, affordable web hosting works in the same way.
If you are going to present text information, the storage doesn’t really matter much, but if you are planning for a large number of images, or videos, you should be sure to get a web host that offer the amount of space that you will need. Getting the needed amount of space from the beginning means you will not have to think about increasing the limit when your material doesn’t fit.
Increasing the limit can be very expensive if chose a small plan, and your host doesn’t allow upgrades, only storage addons, which is normal for affordable web hosting.
Bandwidth
Sometimes referred to as Transfer, is a means to measure how many visitors your website gets, and how much data the visitors download. Lots of video downloads from your site means use are using lots of bandwidth. If you are using more than what is included in your affordable web hosting plan, you may be charged extra. Again, this can be expensive, and you should think about it if you plan on having large images, videos or even software that your visitors can download from your site.
Domains
This is an important factor. If you already have done a domain name registration, you should find out if you can move it from your old affordable web hosting company, if you are already hosted.
If you are registering a new domain name, you should know that some web hosts offer free domain name registration. One of them can be found in the footer of this article.
Web page updates
Some web hosts offer CMS software, content management system. This means they offer a way for you to easily update your web page without having to know how to write HTML code, or such. Several hosts also offer popular free software such as Joomla or Drupal, and even blog software such as WordPress.
Platform / Database
The selection of platform and database engine is connected. If your web host offers hosting on the Linux platform, the script language is PHP and the database is MySQL. For Windows based hosting, ASP/.NET and MSSQL is often used. Unless you are a programmer with special demands in regard to platform, this selection doesn’t matter much to you. More web hosts offer Linux hosting because it is cheaper, hence affordable web hosting.
Web statistics
Most web hosts offer some kind of statistiscs for your web hosting. Unfortunaly they can be pretty simple, but you do not have to do anything to get them working. We recommend Google Analytics though, it is free and really good. To use Google Analytics, you have to include a string of code on your web page. More information is found on Google.
E-mail / Web mail
Not all affordable web hosting companies offer unlimited amounts of e-mail addresses or e-mail accounts. If you are more than one person, a business for instance, you should consider web hosts that offer unlimited, or atleast a lot more e-mail accounts than you need, to be sure you will not have to pay extra fees. You should also have a look on their web mail interface. Most web hosts offer web mail – but if it is poor, and you or your collegues are travelling alot, you may want to reconsider your choice.
Support
What are the support options? Some affordable web hosting companies does not offer support on weekends. How fast can you get support, and when?
Refunds
If you are not satisfied with the service, can you get a refund? What about a domain name, can domain names be moved to another web host after a refund?
Hopefully, you have received some valuable information which will help you when picking out a good web host.
Good luck!
