Before getting excited about spending less than $12 a year to host your site, it is important to weigh some of the disadvantages that come with budget hosting. While low prices offer a strong allure, in many cases, you are getting what you pay for.
A lack of customer support is a large issue facing many budget web hosting companies. If your company is run by one person who is simply reselling space on their server, you may not get the level of help that you could expect from a larger company. Budget hosting companies are typically smaller companies that cannot offer the same level of service that larger companies can provide.
This is also true with technical support. If you feel more comfortable having 24-hour technical support, you may need to go with a company that charges a little more than a budget host, but offers the support you need. Since you aren’t paying much in budget hosting, the resources for running a technical support department 24 hours a day just aren’t there for smaller companies.
Since you are paying less for your space, many budget companies make up for low prices by cramming as many sites onto one server as they possibly can. In fact, you can end up with a site that runs very slowly and does not function properly, simply because the server is overloaded and cannot process requests from 100 different sites all at the same time. It is best to find a budget hosting company that limits the amount of sites that are on one server.
In addition to a lack of system resources, budget hosting usually means a very low amount of data transfer allotment per month. Many hosting companies figure that the webmasters that are attracted by a lower cost simply don’t have the traffic that a large site owner would have. As such, your bandwidth limit may be very low and it is easy to exceed this limit without knowing it. If there are penalties involved with exceeding your limits, any money you would have save with a budget host immediately flies out of your wallet and into the budget hosting company’s cash register.
Set-up fees are quite common with budget hosting companies. This set-up offsets the low monthly price that is charged and helps a smaller company stay fiscally sound. These set-up fees can be as much as $50, which can mean that you are ending up paying more money per year than you would if you went with a regular hosting company that did not charge a set-up fee.
While you may not be paying much for a basic account, if you don’t have the features that you need, you can end up spending more money purchasing additional features and applications than you would with a company that charged a little more per month.
These are just a few of the most common disadvantages that are associated with budget hosting. Let’s put it all together now and go over some important points to consider before making your final selection.
