Cheap Cookie Cutter Webhosting - Good or Bad?

Can you get a quality web host for $3.99 per month? How can they afford to give you all that space and bandwidth so cheaply?

This is installment #2 of JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

I’ve had many web hosts over the years for a paltry few dollars per month. Like most people, a great majority of the time I’ve had no problems with any of them. The difference between my 95% success rate and 5% failure has been the growth of my web site. I think in many ways though - it wasn’t my fault because I think that nearly every web host in the world is engaged in false advertising.

Let’s take a look at goDaddy, who say they are the “largest webhost in the world”. They have an “economy plan” for about $4 per month (price depends on how long you pay for). Before I go on let me state the first rule of web hosting: Never pay for more than month to month service. This rule has served me well, because it’s easy to move to a new web host, and I’ve been with dozens over the years. Just because a host is good this month, doesn’t mean they will next month, or next year. Do you think there’s a reason that a host has a 95% satisfaction rating? What do the 5% unsatisfied customers have problems with and why?

For $4 per month goDaddy offers:

• 10 GB of space
• 300 GB of transfer
• 10 mySQL databases
• 100 email accounts

I’ll tell you right now that 95% of the customers are satisfied because they aren’t getting any traffic. The 5% unsatisfied customers are unhappy because their sites have become busy or big or complex, and they’re unable to keep them working right. When a web host claims “99.9%” uptime that means their servers are online and running 99.9% of the time. It doesn’t mean that their customers web sites were available and error free 99.9% of the time.

The next post in this series will be “GoDaddy - the McDonald’s of Webhosting?”
Read more - JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

Tags: cheap, webhost