Web Hosting Geek

Have you asked yourself the question “Am I paying very much for web hosting?”. Our advise is not to ask yourself this question if you are satisfied of the quality web hosting service you use. You can always lower your web hosting bill and to save $20 – $30 on annual basis. However switching hosts might be painful and would bring a lot of troubles – from configurations of services and tools to downtime and poor customer support.

Web hosting industry is growing at a rapid pace and that means today it is much harder choose a good and reputable host. Not because there aren’t many around, but because they are so many that it is hard to compare them.

A good approach to lower your web hosting bill is to find a coupon code. Tehere are tons of blogs and hosting coupon websites that offer codes for discounted web hosting. Here are a few pages we found – Hostingcoupons.org, web hostign section at Couponcraze, Hosting Coupons & Rebates, HostingCoupons.com, Coupons Whoishostingthis.com. Any of those pages provide codes that will lower your web hosting bill. However be advised that aren’t responsible for the quality of the coupons and hosting services listed on those website. One of the risks to consider is that there isn’t a large choice of coupons on many of those websites and most of them feature a short list of web hosting companies. The resson for this is that publishing web hosting coupons is more a marketing and advertising activity, than content driven by website owners and based on their experience.

Things to consider

Bandwidth (monthly data transfer quota) and disk space are important, but you must not get fished by “unlimited” offerings. They mean “overselling”, especially when it comes to disc space. There is no unlimited disc space! The proof of this are Cloud Hosting providers. Even if they do not provide “unlimited disk space” although they produce web hosting from scalable and redundant infrastructures.

Website Quantity

Most Shared web hosts offer some kind Multi domain hosting services. They might claim to offer unlimited websites on shared account. this is find as far as there is no a certain restriction of the number of sites to host on account. But you shall keep in mind that there are limits. A Popular web host like HostGator for example says about resource usage that user may not use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. “There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc. b) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD”, states the company in their TOS (http://www.hostgator.com/tos.shtml).

If you need multi-domain hosting service we recommend Host Color’s Multi Domain Hosting that costs $6.49/month, Host Gator’s Baby plan (no link to the plan on company’s website) which is priced at $9.95/month or Site5′s hostPro plan which has the same price as HostGator’s one – $9.95/month. All the prices are the monthly cost of the web hosting service based on one 1 year contract.

Control Panel and  Applications

Make sure that the web host is using cPanel, Plesk or other popular control panel. Choose standards based web host. Even if you need a cloud solution follow the standard (if you are in Europe for example you might try Cloud.bg – cPanel Cloud Hosting). In-house control panels are proably a good solution and they are even safer in theory, but you might have a lot of issues using any of them.

The Lenght of Hosting Contracts

Web hosting providers offer substantial discounts when sign up for more than one year. Most of them advertise the price of the 2 or 3 year contracts as the monthly price of the service. However there is a substantial difference between a price of $7.50/month on 3 year contract and $9.50 on 1 year contracts. So do not go for more than 2 year contracts and always watch at the monthly price which apply for 1 year contracts.