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A few years ago, some of the cheapest web hosting companies cost around $10 or more each month. As more cheap hosting competitors cropped up, costs went down - substantially. Today, you can find cheap website hosting almost everywhere; after all, cheap web site hosting companies are a dime a dozen. However, not all cheap website hosts are the same. Below are key elements Web Hosting Report believes all the cheapest web hosting companies should offer for service and reliability:
1. Reliability, Reliability, and Reliability: While nearly all of the cheapest web hosting companies promise 99.9% uptime, many of these cheap hosting companies fail to deliver on this promise. In compiling our rankings of all the best cheap web hosting companies, we spent more than three months gathering data from more than two years to see who offers the best affordable web hosting while still maintaining great uptime, customer service and reliability. As with any service, it’s easy to find complaints. We compare the number of complaints with the number of positive comments to determine the reliability of all these cheap web site hosting companies.
2. Customer Service: Web Hosting Report spent a good deal of time calling various cheap website hosting companies. With some of them, most of that time was spent on hold. With others, our time was spent speaking with competent and knowledgeable representatives. The cheap hosting companies at the top of our rankings provide quality web hosting support to webmasters of all skill levels. Customer support is very important because you never know when something can go wrong. When something does happen, you want to have confidence that the support will be there.
3. Unlimited Bandwidth and Disk Space: Many of the cheapest, and some not so cheap website hosting companies, limit the amount of bandwidth and hosting space in your account. This was a major factor where we found variations in services from these cheap hosting providers. If your hosting space is very limited because you choose a cheap hosting service, than you may find that you could run out of space. If this happens, your choice to get cheap hosting could hurt you in the end. If you can't store all your information, or your site is shut down due to not having enough bandwidth, then this could cause your site to go down or could even trigger hidden fees if you exceed your bandwidth quota.
4. An Anytime Money Back Guarantee: The best cheap web hosting companies demonstrate confidence in their products by upholding them with unlimited money back guarantees. When a company offers such a guarantee, you can feel confident that it will do its best to meet your web hosting needs. These companies don’t want your business for a few months; they want to be your web host, permanently. Even companies offering cheap hosting services want your business for long term. The best cheap web hosting companies will offer money back guarantees.
5. A Free Domain Name or Domain Transfer: Moving your website to good cheap hosting company shouldn’t cost you a penny if you have a domain. If you don’t, a free domain will save you a few dollars. Either way, this is a perk offered by most of the best cheap web hosting companies.
Our rankings for the best affordable web hosting companies heavily weighs uptime reliability and customer service, as these are the most important elements of any cheap website hosting company. As far as we’re concerned, everything else is a bonus. While it may be tempting to choose the cheapest web hosting service, the risk of downtime combined with lower quality service isn’t worth the $10 or $15 a year you might save. |
