Cheap Web Hosting v/s Affordable Web Hosting

(13th Dec, 2005) Web Pages (Website) is a very important part of any business now a days. You can sell virtaul / physical goods through ecommerce website, you can communicate with your business associates, potential customers or friends/family members through your website.

Since web pages have so many benefits, many businesses rush into purchasing cheap web hosting services in order to put up a web page and start making profits. Many visitors have asked me question "Are cheap web hosting services very different from affordable web hosting services? What is the catch in offering a cheap web hosting solution?" Let us begin with cheap web hosting solution defination. How can you differentiate between both of them?

According to my opinion, any web hosting plan that is below $3/month can be termed as a cheap web hosting plan. Any web hosting plan between $3 to $8 per month will be affordable web hosting plan. Most of the companies now a days offer cheap web hosting plan that range between $1/month to $3/month only. Most Cheap Web Hosting Plan on Linux platform range between 10 MB Space to 300 MB Space and 1 GB to 10 GB Bandwidth. These plans support php, perl and in most cases 1 to 5 mysql databases. For windows related cheap web hosting plans, they support asp, asp.net and ms access database in most cases. Hard disk space and Bandwidth are almost similar to linux cheap web hosting plans.

What is the "catch" driving these cheap web hosting offers?
According to my opinion, cheap web hosting services are not just inexpensive, but often low quality as well. Now a days, you can find fast dedicated managed web hosting server deal for as low as $200- $300 per month. On this kind of cheap servers most companies are hosting more than 400 domains. So, on cheap servers their per domain hardware and server management cost is less than $1 per month. I think that this is the main reason most company are offering cheap web hosting below $3 per month price. However, beware that they may not be very secure, and they may offer poor quality web hosting services. Often, the customer support with cheap web hosting services is almost non-existent. Business planning to post a website with cheap web hosting service should consider that they do not have more room for proper customer service assistance, proper tools of web hosting and the most important reliable web hosting. In many cases, businesses are unhappy to note that cheap web hosting experience many technical problems, leaving the company web site unavailable to customers for long stretches of time. In most cases, cheap web hosting services simply charge too little to be able to offer what companies need. For example, in the market you can find powerful antispam components / software like declude available for $899 per server. Most cheap web hosting company many not be able to afford this component and they will compromise in anti spam security on the server.  As long as cheap web hosting works fine, there may not be a problem. However, getting a slow load time or downtime addresses can be tricky.

My recommendation for selecting "Affordable Web Hosting" and avoid "Cheap Web Hosting"?
Most businesses should select a high quality affordable web hosting company to do business with rather than cheap web hosting. Affordable web hosting companies have enough revenue per web server to focus on variety of security tools like anti-spam, anti-virus, assisgning a proper server manager, etc... they can offer you full value of your money. So, on longer period with minimum downtimes, enough security of yoru ecommerce transaction, reliable mail servers... "affordable web hosting" always win over "cheap web hosting".

I have a personal web page and I want to share my thoughts, ideas, put my guestbook and share my recent images with my friends and family members... should I go with "cheap web hosting"?
Yes, cheap web hosting is ideal for personal websites. If you can afford minor downtime, you don't perform ecommerce transaction and minor downtime of email is affordable to you, I recommend to go for cheap web hosting plans.

Bettle of cheap web hosting and affordable web hosting is endless. It all depends on requirements of your website.