Our Overall Top 3 Best Web Hosting Picks
So you feel like you have the next million-dollar idea and you’re ready to put your plan into action, stop right there. Before you buy the domain name and sign up for web hosting you’ll first need to understand some of the common terms web hosting companies use.
Just like everything else in life, the devil’s in the details. Now were not trying to scare you or make you feel like every web hosting company is out to scam you. That’s just not the truth. But everyday terms such as unlimited don’t really mean what you’re used to them meaning.
We hope after you get done reading this article you’ll have a better idea of what terms to look for and what their actual meaning is.
Understanding pricing options
The best way to explain the way pricing works with web hosting is to just give a real life example, so here we go.
Let’s say you visit a web hosting company’s website and the first thing that catches your eye is $2.95 month, sounds great right. Before you get all excited you need to understand that the $2.95 price is actually a discounted price based on you signing up for multiple years and paying in advance. Now if you’ve done your homework and really researched that web hosting company then paying for 2 years in advance is no big deal, one less bill to deal with at the end of the month.
What most people don’t understand is that after that period is up, your hosting account will then renew at its normal price. So how are you supposed to know what the normal price is. This one’s pretty easy, all you have to do is find the discounted price and either look directly above or below for the price with the X over it, this is usually their normal non-discounted price.
Storage (server space) how much storage do you need
If you’re like most people the words unlimited storage mean just that “unlimited” so you can put up unlimited pictures and an unlimited number of videos on your website, not so fast.
What unlimited really means is “unrestricted”, say what? Once again the best way to understand this is to look at an example.
Let’s say we have 100 people on a server, the average amount of storage used by each of those hundred people is 200 megabytes, this is pretty much the norm for most websites. Now let’s just say one of those hundred people decide they want to host all of their videos and stream them directly off of the server, this not only balloons their storage to several hundred gigabytes, but also starts to hog server resources from other users. Now at this point the customer would be contacted by the web hosting company and told they are using too much of the servers resources and in order to keep other customers happy their account may be suspended, this is a great thing for everybody else on the server but not so good for the resource hog.
For 95% of the people looking for web hosting, unlimited storage will work just fine, but if you plan on being a server hog, please either sign up for a VPS or dedicated server.
Quick hint – When reading customer reviews you’ll often see people complaining that their site was shut down for no reason at all, this is usually a dead giveaway they were trying to hog all the resources which in turn causes the other customers websites to run slow. We look at this as a good thing, get rid of customers who shouldn’t have signed up for that type of account to start off with.
Bandwidth (transfer) do you know what unlimited transfer means
Bandwidth works the same way essentially as storage when comes to the word “unlimited”. The vast majority of people don’t have to worry about this at all.
The only people who have anything to worry about are the same people who you don’t want on your server anyhow.
CMS’s, shopping carts, and one click installs, oh my
No matter what web hosting company you decide to choose, one thing you’ll want to make sure they offer is a software or script installer. Every control panel should allow you to install CMS’s such as Joomla! or Drupal with a few clicks of the mouse. But it doesn’t stop there, you’ll also be able to install your favorite blogging platforms and shopping cart software for those of you wanting to start an online e-commerce storefront.
Think of these types of scripts as the heart of your website. Once inside your control panel you’ll get a better idea of what we mean.
Free domain names, our opinion on the subject
We’ve never been a big fan of free domain names with a hosting account since most of the time these domain names are actually owned by the web hosting company and not yourself. If you don’t know why this is a big deal let’s just look at a worst-case scenario.
A year has gone by since you signed up for web hosting and your free domain, it’s been a great year your traffic is increasing each month and you feel like it’s time to move to a virtual private server. Now if you’d gone ahead and purchased the domain name on your own at this point all you have to do is change the domain name servers to your new VPS account and you’d be done.
If you decided to save $10 and let your web hosting company give you a free domain, then you’re going to be running into some serious problems transferring that domain name. You see when most hosting companies give you a free domain name they register it under their name, if you’d like to change that it’ll usually cost you twice as much as it would have if you’d just bought the domain name yourself in the beginning.
