Posted on November 30th, 2009There are thousands of web hosting companies out there offering website hosting for very low prices. However, there is a reason that they are doing this and that is volume. They normally host thousands of other websites on one server and share the same IP address. Spammers are most likely using these companies to host their websites. Why? Because they are cheap and if the spammers do get banned they can simply move onto the next one. If you shared IP address is heavily spammed and it will be banned from the search engines, which means your website will be affected. Your traffic will drop dramatically and you would have to change hosting company and possibly wait a few months before your website’s ranking is back.
The next thing to look out for is the control panel, also known as the administration section. Cpanel is the most popular one and most web hosting will offer you this, but do check with them before you buy. Most freelance web designers are familiar with this control panel and can work quickly with. So if you’ve hired someone to setup your website and pay them by the hours then you will save money and they will thank you for making it easy for them!
How many times have you seen 99.9% uptime slogan? But the true is that most of these companies cannot deliver this and they won’t refund your money for this. You need read the small print / terms and conditions. Some good companies will offer to reduce the price of one month if the downtime is over a certain period of time. Knowing this now, what you should do is use the monthly payment option if you’ve never used the company before and try their service out for at least 6 months before paying them the yearly cost. During this ‘trial period’ you will be able to find out how good their servers are, as well as their customer service. Send them an email and see how long it would take them to reply. A good web hosting company should reply within the same day. Pay attention to the reply and get a feel of how well they’ve answered your question.