Our list of the best cheap web hosting companies focuses on monthly costs, terms, and overall value. There are a few factors you should consider when choosing the best web host for your website, cheap or not.
Unlimited vs Unmetered
Web hosting services seem to switch between unlimited and unmetered in terms of disk space and bandwidth without explanation. You can usually find the answer by reading the fine print of each host’s terms and conditions.
When your storage space is unlimited, it often comes with strings attached. For example, if you are using too many resources on a shared server because it is related to others on the server, the web host may ask you to remove files from your website.
Unmetered bandwidth usually means the hosting company isn’t paying much attention to your website traffic, but if it exceeds a certain amount, say 300,000 in a month, the host may ask you to switch to a virtual private server (VPS). ).
Businesses may change terms
Even if you find a web host that promises 100% uptime, unlimited storage, or $1 a month, they can change the terms at any time. It’s a good idea to read any changes a web host makes to their policies to ensure they still fit your website needs well.
The importance of uptime
It is common to see 99.90% to 100% uptime in web hosting marketing. What difference does 0.10% make? First, these uptime guarantees do not apply to planned downtime for maintenance purposes. If you find your site is down, but the web host has informed you that this will happen, it doesn’t count. Unplanned downtime occurs when hosting companies scramble to get service up and running again, otherwise they owe many people months off.
If your website is only active 99.90% of the time, that equates to about 44 minutes of downtime per month. Increase that uptime to 99.99% of the time and you might have about 4 minutes of downtime per month.
Does the server location matter?
The server location may affect the speed of one’s website for some users. If you have a bakery in Chicago, most of your website visitors are likely to be local, so you should choose a host with servers in the central United States. Server location shouldn’t affect search engine optimization (SEO), so it shouldn’t affect your search engine rankings. However, some experts disagree, believing that server location can affect ranking.
What are inodes?
If you’re doing your due diligence, you may have noticed the word inodes in a web hosting company’s policies. An inode is a data structure that contains all the attributes of a file. It contains information about a file or directory, such as B. File name, permissions and time of the last change. Sometimes web hosts don’t limit disk space, but limit inodes (HostGator limits inodes to 100,000 for shared plans).
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