Inexpensive Web Hosting

Comparison and reviews of the most popular inexpensive web hosting providers.

Inexpensive web hosting - how to choose a fast and reliable service from the bulk of cheap solutions.

Although it's possible to spend thousands of dollars a year on web hosting alone, this page is focused on finding the most reliable, fast, yet inexpensive web hosting solution.

Choosing a good host is a rather difficult endeavor since you can get excellent or lousy service for the same price. It's much better to get it right the first time, than to move from one host to another spending time and money.

There are plenty of companies that offer inexpensive web hosting services. You can even find hosts which offer a long list of features for as low as $1-$2 per month. But be wary - they usually offer not much disk space (20-50 MB), only 1-year contracts, and, since hard disk space is cheap these days, they make money by placing thousands of sites on one physical computer.

I tried such an extremely inexpensive web hosting provider offering 50MB of disk space, unlimited bandwidth and 99.99%(!) uptime guarantee for $2/month.

It was a real headache. Almost every day, during peak hours, the site was inaccessible or very slow at best. Also, three times the site was down for two or three days and I had to restore it from my copy. These downtimes were long enough for Google to drop almost all pages out of its index.

My personal recommendations how to choose the most reliable service from the bulk of inexpensive web hosting providers...

1) Even if your site needs only 1 MB of disk space and 1 GB of transfer like the vast majority of sites, choose a host that offers much more - several hundred MB of storage space and not less than 5-10 GB of bandwidth. It ensures that they don't host too many sites on one physical server and their network isn't overloaded.

2) Choose a host that offers a money back guarantee. Those that do are more confident about high quality of their hosting. Use a web service that monitors your site. For example, the free version of Hyperspin checks your server and site every 60 minutes and emails you alerts if something goes wrong.

3) An important feature to look for is whether they do a backup of customer's files every day (the grand majority of inexpensive web hosting providers do not). In case of a hard drive failure (this happens frequently on many hosting services) they can quickly restore your data from the backup copy.

4) Customer support is very important. To test it before opening an account, email them with a few sample questions to check the speed and quality of their responses. Although this doesn't guarantee that they will respond at the same speed if you do become a customer, this approach is rather accurate.

Here are a few inexpensive web hosting providers (under $10 per month) that have been in business quite a while, are established, reliable and most often mentioned on the Web...

Of course, all of them offer FTP access, autoresponders, email forwarding, CGI, SSI, FrontPage, PHP, real audio/video http streaming, site statistics and the like.

In my opinion, the best inexpensive hosting deal for standard and small ecommerce sites is iPowerWeb . They provide much more disk space and bandwidth than an average site needs, daily tape backups, iPage website builder, free domain name, free shopping cart and toll free telephone support.

Dot5Hosting is another promising inexpensive web hosting provider offering the similar features at an even lower price.

Omnis offers two times more bandwidth.

If you feel the need for even more bandwidth, choose midPhase . They also provide free domain, free site builder (SimpleSite Wizard) and very high (99.98%) uptime guarantee.

BlueHost offers more disk space, free domain and 5 add-on domains (additional domain pointers which can point to subdirectories of the main site).

Globat charges a $19.95 setup fee, but is a good choice for those who really need such a gigantic web space.

StartLogic provides the same disk space and even more bandwidth.

PowWeb offers the same disk space and is cheaper than many others since they provide 6 extra free months of hosting when you order 1 year. You can additionally save $6 by entering the coupon code may05 during the checkout process.

AdvancedNetwork provides a lot of disk space, free domain name and a free site builder (Site Studio).

1&1 offers inexpensive Windows hosting with ASP, as well as a wide variety of inexpensive Unix hosting plans.

EasyCGI is a good choice for those who need reliable Windows 2000 hosting with ASP, ASP.NET, MS Access and ColdFusion.

Multiple Domain Hosting

Inexpensive multiple domain hosting - a low-cost solution for owners of multiple sites. Comparison and reviews of the most popular multiple domain web hosting providers.

Since mini web sites are becoming the new marketing method to generate traffic and sales, many webmasters own a lot of domains and need multiple separate web hosting accounts (one for each mini web site).

Realizing this, many hosting companies have developed plans which offer discounts for multiple domain hosting. Here are companies that, instead of merely offering a 10%, 20% or even 50% discount when buying additional accounts (standard for many hosts), have taken it a step further...

Of course, all of them offer FTP access, CGI/Perl, SSI, PHP, site statistics and the like. Plans with a lot of domains are especially good for hosting mini web sites (micro sites) and redirecting to affiliate programs or other sites. Here are quick reviews of these providers...

midPhase

InfinityHost

SpeedFox

WebsiteSource

Jumpline

Site Builder can be used in two ways...

• As a stand alone development tool which includes basic web hosting, 10 GB of bandwidth, and costs $4.95 a month.
• Combined with one of the above hosting plans (for a one-time $30 setup fee).

NewWebsite