Cheap web hosting: cheap for a reason
You get what you pay for; this certainly seems true in the web hosting arena.
Couple of days back I decided to give a cheap web host (a reseller advertising at DP) a go, I needed hosting for a project I had in mind and it was something I wanted to keep off from my current host. Because I am already hosting almost a dozen websites on that account and of these most are blogs, couple of static sites and couple of forums.
Since this project happens to be a blog that I am using to develop a domain and I wasn’t too keen on spending much attention or money on it, because of this I decided to host it on a cheap reseller account.
According to my “host” I got a Reseller account with 1 GB of space, 10 GB bandwidth, WHM, CPanel and usual assortment of unlimited MySQL databases, email accounts etc. all this for a princely sum of US$ 1 a month.
Although I never expected it to be as good as my current host, to whom I am paying US $ 20 a month for 10GB of space and 75 GB bandwidth; I did expect the servers to be a little faster.
So far I have had the following problems:
Account creation delay and even after account was created the WHM/CPanel password wasn’t sent. I had to request for it again and after half an hour I finally received it.
So far the server has been acting a bit slow, no matter what time I try to access the blog. Strangely the CPanel responds faster than the wordpress blog!
The blog became unresponsive for almost half an hour, all this while the CPanel was up and running just fine.
Although the state of affair seems sad, I am just glad that I didn’t use this account for an important project. For the time being, I will give this host a benefit of doubt and will see how this month goes and decide next month whether I want to continue with him or not.
But one thing is for sure, my advice to any one hosting a site, forum or blog would be to host it on a reliable host who might just charge a little more but give you piece of mind and a service which would ensure that your project doesn’t have too much down time.
When first starting out I also made the mistake of looking for the cheapest deal. That was the biggest mistake I made while learning. Reliable, quality hosting is vital to your sites success. If viewers can not access your site, or it loads slow for them, they will look elsewhere. When it comes to selecting a host it is worth it to pay a little more for a known quantity.
Lenny I absolutely agree with you on this, if one is serious about their site then the first thing they should concentrate on is reliability and responsiveness of the host rather than the amount of bandwidth and space they will get (which cheap hosts offer tons of).
[...] I wrote “Cheap web hosting: cheap for a reason”, I knew that this probably wasn’t going to be the best hosting experience, but I never thought [...]
[...] I wrote “Cheap web hosting: cheap for a reason”, I knew that this probably wasn’t going to be the best hosting experience, but I never thought [...]