<H3>What is important for customer before they purchase cheap web hosting?</H3>

I started my carrier with personal website for articles and reviews in 1999 and I signed up for a cheap web hosting account with a known hosting company. I was new with the web hosting terms and I planned to offer my articles, views, reviews to site visitors for free of cost. I never planned for an e-commerce website or paid services. After a year of good quality work, we noticed very good traffic on website. We noticed that visitors were asking for re-print of the articles and ready to offer $$$ for that. I started offering free reprints with a courtesy link. I got suggestion from someone in the forum that I should change my website and make it compatible with ecommerce transactions to charge online for content. It was a very good idea. I hired a programmer and changed my website to ecommerce web site and noticed decent ecommerce revenue for articles. However, I forgot to change my cheap web hosting account and sign up for an affordable web hosting company. I noticed some minor downtime with ecommerce website every month but they were affordable.

Suddenly, after 2 months of smooth running, I noticed regular downtime of 2-3 hours a day.  When I did research on this issue, I came to know that the company has hosted excessive cheap web hosting accounts on the server. Server was not able to sustain and function normally with Number of accounts hosted on the server. 7 days in a raw I noticed downtime and backup issues. I prepared chart of losses incurred due to this downtime and surprisingly I almost lost "100 X Yearly payment of cheap web hosting account". This was a real nightmare.

I learnt that before cheap web hosting account signup you should consider following details:

1. Monitor "Response Time" of Web Hosting company to your support questions full month in a raw. Even for a cheap web hosting account it should be very decent.

2. Try to receive information of how many domains are hosted on the server where your domain is hosted. You can easily find this important information using website http://www.whois.sc/ . Try for http://www.whois.sc/yourdomainname.com

3. Search for poor and good reviews about this web hosting company.

4. Monitor uptime guarantee of your cheap web hosting account using website monitoring tools like http://www.alerta.com.

At least monitor your cheap web hosting account for a month for decent response, uptime and number of domains hosted on the server. If everything is decent you can signup for cheap web hosting account.