Don’t make price your number one reason for picking a web hosting company. Cheap prices don’t translate into quality web hosting, but it is possible to save money at the time of checkout and in some cases, even put money back in your pocket a few weeks after your purchase.Most web hosting companies offer pretty much the same thing and that’s where it can get confusing. So once you’ve decided on the features you want from a web host, grab a sheet of paper. You’ll be making a simple comparison chart for helping you find a winning web host by fine tuning a few details.
First off, stay away from reseller hosting. You can smell them a mile away. Resellers are “web hosting companies” that aren’t really hosting companies at all. You’re next door neighbor could be a reseller simply buy paying a big web hosting company a fee for renting disk space on one of their servers. Then the reseller rations out the disk space he rents into tiny segments and resells it to you. You’ll typically see small packages like 25, 50, 100 and 200 megabytes of disk space for monthly fees that far exceed what a professional hosting package costs for unlimited disk space. You simply cannot save money taking this route. When in doubt, contact their customer support and flat out ask them if they are a reseller.
And unless you have a specific need for Windows hosting, we’ll assume you’re looking at shared Unix hosting. It’s the most cost effective and offers the most disk space and bandwidth.
Most of the top web hosting companies now offer unlimited disk space, bandwidth, email, databases and the ability to host unlimited domain names on one account. Because of that, we aren’t going to include those features in our comparison chart, but consider them during your search.
One point I’d like to make, being able to host unlimited domains on one account is extremely cost effective if you’re into niche and affiliate marketing. You’ll be able to register additional domain names and host them on the same web hosting account with having pay for additional hosting.
The duration of plan offerings range from 3 to 36-month plans. More often than not, any plan below 12 months comes with a setup fee, plus you’ll have to pay extra for registering a domain name. So when you add up the setup fee and the cost of the domain name and hosting service, you’re really not saving any money. Also consider that when you register a domain name, the least amount of time you can get it for is one year.
For this chart, compare only 12-month plans.
Turn the paper sideways and make the following columns:
Hosting Company Name
Price/Month
Control Panel
Support
Guarantee
Coupons
Other Offers
Hosting Company Name: Down the left side of the chart, write down the names of the hosting company that you’re interested in.
Price/Month: Enter the price per month for the 12-month plan.
Control Panel: The control panel is the interface from which you’ll manage your account. Just to name a few, there’s cPanel, Ops, and vDeck. You’ll also find some custom written ones. cPanel is the leading control panel and I highly recommend it. With all else being equal, pick a web host that has cPanel. Interjecting just one strong point, cPanel has very powerful email filtering options that allows you to filter out spam on both the entire domain or individual email address on the domain.
Support: Look for support that’s available 24/7. If something’s going buggers on your account, you want action now, not 12 hours from now.
Guarantee: Look for an *unconditional* 30-day money back guarantee. I’ve seen as little as 15 days and that doesn’t give you enough time to build your site and then get traffic to it. I’ve also seen a 120-day guarantee, but it wasn’t unconditional. It stated something to the effect that “…if we don’t provide you with everything we said we would…” I think you’d have a hard time getting your money back from that one if you needed to.
Coupons: Before you actually place your order, look at the web hosting company’s order form. If there a space for entering a coupon code, use your favorite search engine to find one. Pay attention to the details of the coupon offer because some coupon codes are only good on the super-size plans while others are good on all plans.
Other Offers: If the hosting company offers any other extras that would help sway your mind, write them down. Some offer free software, advertising credits at Google, Yahoo or Miva, or even the help of a live webmaster. If you can get a domain name for free, read the fine print because it might only be free for the first year with an annual renewal fees thereafter. Other companies give you a free domain name for life as long as you remain their customer. Some web hosts are now integrating Google Webmaster Tools into their accounts.
You might even find special incentive offers from 3rd parties like rebates which put money back in your pocket. While a coupon code can get you an instant discount during the checkout process, rebates can sometimes get you deeper discounts if you’re willing to wait 6-8 weeks to get them. Just be sure to follow the instructions because you usually can’t combine coupon codes and rebates.
When you’re finished, count the web hosting companies on your chart. Let’s say you have five. Assign a unique number (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5) to each company with 1 representing the company that you’d like most to host your website and 5 representing the one that appeals to you the least.
I hope you found this information helpful.
Keek
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