Monday, February 1, 2010

Affordable Website Hosting - Ups and Downs

By Nicholas Halmond

The first thing you should understand about affordable web hosting is the way it works. Many people believe that they have to get the most expensive type of hosting available and purchase all the extras needed to make a spectacular site. However, what these sites won't tell you is that most of the features you get, you won't use in the beginning anyways. The only time this applies is when people are uploading sites through FTP clients. Otherwise, all you need is affordable web hosting to get you started.

On the upside, most affordable web hosting packages are complete. They have a reasonable amount of space and bandwidth for blog sites to be hosted or even small forums to be managed. The PHP support along with other support for databases like MySQL should be enough for several different types of sites to be set up with ease.

Plus you don't have to worry about losing all your information on the site. When you come across a good affordable web hosting plan, the back office control panels will help you along the way. Even if you're new to this, they have FAQ and Help sections that can navigate you in case there are any questions you might have down the road. Add in FTP access for uploading files, and you could actually have your site ready in a flash.

Through our own experience, we've noticed that speed and security is a vital part to your website's success. If things are going well you will eventually have a good amount of traffic coming in everyday. When traffic rises, your website may slow a bit depending on the bandwidth that is being used. However, if you compare the speeds to a free web hosting site, you will truly see a major difference and realize how much better it is for you to have affordable web hosting.

While there are many positive aspects to an affordable web hosting package, there are also issues that come along. We already mentioned multimedia capabilities, and when you mix this with high traffic your site will have a major slow down. When you reach this point you'll want to upgrade to dedicated web hosting for faster speeds.

Then of course you have to think about possible virus attacks when you're sharing servers. Even though most people don't think about it, you need to make sure you back everything up in case someone else hasn't properly built their site for protection. This way you can avoid future issues.

We would even recommend paying the extra fee (it's small) to be a part of the WHOIS domain privacy package. It will allow you to keep your personal information secure, and alleviate any obstacles that could surface from it. Since most of these companies don't offer custom name servers to be made, a dedicated server is better in the privacy protection area. Just remember that it costs more.

These rather minor drawbacks do not tarnish affordable web hosting all that much in generation. Affordable web hosting packages are still perfect for any webmasters that want to seriously bring their website to a commercial audience. Upgrades should only be made as soon as these drawbacks are realized so nobody is harmed by the site browsing experience. Because dedicated servers can be several times more expensive than affordable web hosting, affordable web hosting is the recommended choice when you are uncertain of what you need for your site.

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