Finding a Low Cost Web Hosting Package

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Low Cost Hosting
10GB storage, 250GB b/width, Perl, MySQL, SSL,
$6.95pm
www.ipower.com

Host for Less
100GB, 1000GB, Perl, ASP
$6.95pm
www.globat.com

Low Cost High Speed Hosting
2500MB, 100GB Bandwidth,
£3.29pm
www.uk2.net

When creating a web site, part of the integral design process should be the careful choice of hosting provider.  The choice of server can impact on whether your site is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the sort of programs, scripts and pages you can store.

If it is a commercial site, you need to ensure that you have control over the site contents and that your customers are not turned away by server errors and failures.  You therefore need strong technical support from the host provider and the knowledge that in the event that something does go wrong, your site will be up and running in the shortest time possible, causing as little inconvenience to your business and your customers as possible.

When we were looking to create our first commercial website (RWAP Adventures), we decided that the free web site space provided by our Internet Service Provider (or ISP) was not quite up to the standards we required. At the time, our ISP was the highly popular AOL (America On Line).

We were looking for a hosting package that would allow us to run Perl and Java scripts, provide our own advertising links and use a dedicated FTP program

AOL actually provide two sets of free web site hosting - AOL Hometown (for anyone) and AOL Members (for people with AOL as their Internet Service Provider). In common with the majority of free webspace providers, AOL Hometown has advertising banners added to it by AOL (from which AOL earn revenue) and also insists on you using their own web based methods for uploading pages to your web site. AOL Members does not have any additional advertising and allows you to use a separate FTP program which at first glance appears acceptable. However, we found that pages stored on this free webspace were actually echoed on another server, with the advertising banners re-added. This also caused untold problems with our visitor tracking, as there were two servers being used each with different addresses for the website.

What Problems exist with Free Website Hosting?

Some problems with free web hosting can have a serious impact on your rankings in search engines and hence your ability to attract traffic to your site, so what are the main problems?

1. A lot of free website space providers place your own webpage into a frame and then generate a page around it which can means that people with browsers which do not handle frames (and some search engine robots) cannot see your actual webpage, just the container around it.
2. Some free webspace merely includes a link from the frame to your real webpage - direct access to that real web-page is not allowed without a username and password. This means that robots cannot read the details on your webpage even if they can find the link within the frame.
3. Advertising can be added to your web-pages.  You have no control over the content of the adverts which may not be relevant to your site, or might even direct traffic to your rivals. What is worse, is that you do not earn any revenue from those adverts should users click on it and place an order.  The adverts can even appear over the top of your own logo or navigation controls !
4. The title, keyword and description from your page may be echoed at the top of the container provided by the free web hosting company, which means that you stand a risk of your site being blacklisted for repeating HTML elements within the page.
5. Free web hosting providers tend to allocate low bandwidth (the amount of data that can be viewed from your website in each month) and slow servers to their free websites. This can lead to unreliable access for both your visitors and you (when you need to update the site).
6. The hosting providers can quickly go out of business or just close down your site without any notice.
7. There is no support if you cannot get a script to work on your page for some reason.
8. The ability to run different scripts on your website (perl, php, or asp for example) and access to SQL databases tends to be limited or non-existent.
9. There is generally no ability to add a robots.txt or amend the .htaccess file to your site to prevent access to certain areas, password protect areas of your site, or allow visitors to upload their own files to your site.
10. Access to log files is normally very limited or non-existent. The log files on your hosting server can provide extremely useful information about the traffic which comes to your website, for example the countries they come from, types of browser they use, and what search terms bring them to your site.

11. Someone else may utilise the free website hosting provider to host adult content or spyware - this may impact on the ability to get your website approved by the major search engines - for example, topcities.com and websites on there are blocked by Google warning visitors that the website is not safe and should not be visited unless you are certain of the authenticity and willing to take the risk that it may harm your computer.  Not exactly good for your own image.

What Alternative is there ? - I do not want to pay £100s for a site.

Once you decide to move away from free hosting for your website, you need to consider the various packages available. Hosting is cheaper than you may at first think, and with the ability to create and implement your own affiliate marketing strategy you will find that you can offset much of the cost by earning additional income from your site.

There are plenty of low cost hosting options available (from as little as £1 per month), however, you need to read the small print carefully - many of these do not promise full 24/7 support and latency (when a server fails latency allows your site to continue to be available from a backup server). Many also only offer low bandwidth, which can limit the number of potential customers that your site can service (as well as the availability of downloads).

So What Factors Dictate the Choice of Hosting Package?

You need to consider the following factors when choosing a web site host:

1. Storage Space - remember to take account of all web site pages, images, downloads, scripts and log files that your site will generate. 10GB is really the minimum you should aim for, and if you want to include music or video on your site, you need to consider a lot more than this (although you could look at storing large files on specialist services, such as that offered by Streamload.com which offers unlimited storage for video and audio files. Globat have now amended their packages to offer a massive 100GB storage and 1000GB bandwidth per month which should be enough for most purposes
2. Bandwidth - this affects how many visitors can access your website each month and some companies impose large additional charges if you exceed the bandwidth restrictions. You therefore need to ensure that your bandwidth can cope with the expected traffic and needs of your visitors as well as the needs of your business.
3. Support available - this should be 24/7 support both by email and telephone (in case you cannot get to your email!)
4. Scripting languages supported - many sites will need PHP or Perl and the ability to link to online databases (using SQL or MS Access extensions).
5. Is anonymous FTP available? This allows your visitors to upload their own files onto your server (which can be a lot quicker than sending them to you by email).
6. Email facilities - most hosts offer several email accounts, with anti-spam and other filtering available.  Some even offer anti-virus checking on the server to prevent emails with viruses ever getting to your computer.
7. Quality of log files is also an important consideration. Both of the hosting companies detailed below offer excellent log facilities, but we have come across some hosts who only reset the log files when the server cache is full (so you cannot compare month on month details) and may only provide the top 10 entries for each section.
8. Do they offer any plug in facilities - such as ready built bulletin boards?

We have therefore chosen two low cost hosting packages to serve our own websites - Globat and iPower.