Cheap Web Hosting

Your Complete Guide to Affordable, Reliable Web Hosts

Whether you’re a small business wanting to be found by customers online, a novice just learning how to publish a basic website, an artist showcasing your portfolio, a small online store or a personal blogger who just wants to express your thoughts, inexpensive web hosting plans should be your starting point.

Cheap web hosting — also known as budget hosting, value hosting or affordable hosting – lets you quickly get a site up and running for about the same price you pay for one cup of coffee.  Despite some of the negative perceptions that cheap hosting comprises the quality, it is still the best and cost-effective solution for most users’ needs and in general this idea is quite far from the truth for the vast majority of users.  The cheap hosting plans presented on this site offer excellent capacity, quality and security. Through this guide, we’ll help you explore this hosting option so you can make an informed purchasing decision.

 WHAT IS CHEAP WEB HOSTING?

Cheap web hosting is a type of hosting plan offered by web hosting companies at rock bottom prices. Naturally, price is its main selling point. The low fees, as well as fast and easy setup, make this the most popular option.

Prices can be as low as two dollars per month to almost nothing. The highest you’d pay on the average is around $7 per month. Take note that this figure keeps changing as hosting technology becomes more efficient and competition among hosting companies gets fiercer.

These companies use many tactics to get you to sign up with them instead of the competition. Aside from giving frequent promotions and special coupons, many offer discounts upon purchase if you pre-pay for a longer period. For example, buying two years’ worth of service would cost you less in the long run than if you pay monthly installments for two years.

When talking about cheap web hosting, shared hosting inevitably gets mentioned because these two go hand in hand. The term “cheap hosting” is often used to mean the same as shared web hosting.

In a nutshell, shared hosting refers to the sharing of a web server’s resources (disk storage, bandwidth, etc.) so the costs of buying and maintaining the machine is split between all the users, keeping costs down for everyone.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES & DISADVANTAGES OF CHEAP WEB HOSTING?

Cheap hosting inherits many of the pros and cons of shared hosting:

Pros

• It’s the least expensive option amongst all kinds of paid hosting plans.
• It’s easy to get started – the hosting provider takes care of setup.
• You can get a site up in less time than it will take you to finish reading this guide.
• You’ll have at your disposal user-friendly tools for building and managing your website.
• You don’t need a technical background in server administration.
• The hosting provider does the server maintenance and troubleshooting for you.

Cons

• You don’t have much control over what can be installed on your server.
• You share the server’s resources with many other users, so if you happen to be in a “bad neighborhood” or if some users are resource hogs, your site can be affected.
• There are limits imposed on your account, even if it’s advertised to have “unlimited” features.
• The hosting company might even cancel your account if you exceed your resource usage. Although with reputable providers such as those listed above this is very rare.

IS CHEAP WEB HOSTING FOR YOU?

Cheap hosting is ideal for:

• Self-hosted blogs, such as those running on the WordPress platform
• Personal websites
• Personal portfolios
• Small businesses in need of an online presence
• Online storefronts with small inventories
• Low-traffic or new websites

The type of site you want to set up will dictate the type of hosting you choose and the features you’ll need. When planning, be realistic. Always aim for making the most out of your budget.

Don’t pay a huge amount of money for powerful hosting and other bells and whistles when you have a 5-page blog meant for journaling your vacation experiences and for showing off your vacation photos to a handful of family and friends. It’s just plain overkill.

Even when you’re anticipating that your site will grow soon, it’s still wise to start with cheap shared hosting. You can always upgrade later on to either virtual private server (VPS) hosting or dedicated server hosting when you outgrow your plan. Your web hosting provider should be more than happy to help you make the transition.

Try our simple, interactive quiz to help you quickly narrow down your options if you are unsure what hosting plan would be best for you.

WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK FOR IN CHEAP WEB HOSTING PLANS?

Cheap shared hosting may not have as many features as advanced hosting plans like dedicated or VPS hosting, but in most cases, it fulfills the requirements of a small, low-traffic website or blog. These days the following are pretty standard cheap web hosting features:

• Free setup
• Free domain name registration
• Free email accounts
• One-click installers of popular software like WordPress
• Easy website builders
• User-friendly control panels
• FTP access
• Ecommerce shopping carts
• “Unlimited” disk space (see our note below on “unlimited”)
• “Unlimited” bandwidth
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Customer support

Depending on the provider, you can also get a lot of extras at no further cost, such as security features, site monitoring and traffic reports, shopping carts and payment gateway integration, and other enhancements. Some would even throw in advertising credits and discounts to third-party services.

If you’re unsure whether cheap hosting covers all your website’s needs, you can look through our features-shopping guide.

WHICH CHEAP WEB HOSTING PROVIDER SHOULD YOU SIGN UP WITH?

Cheap web hosting gets a lot of bad rap these days, which is deserved to an extent. Shady operators proliferate, and companies more interested in making a quick profit than in taking care of their customers engage in questionable practices.

For this reason we at WebHostingSearch.com are committed to bringing you fair and balanced reviews of only legitimate and established web hosts that are also invested in raising the bar in terms of performance and support.

In general, you should sign up with a cheap web hosting provider that offers you the best deal for the following:

• Price/Value for Money – Is it cheap just to attract customers, or does it have the features I need?
• Reliability – What is the company’s track record in terms of capacity, uptime, and support?
• Support – If something goes bad, can I easily reach this company to help me sort it out?

Go ahead, check out our list above of top cheap and reliable hosting providers. We’ve compiled our list with care so you can quickly find the right web host that matches your specific needs.

OTHER THINGS YOU’D WANT TO KNOW ABOUT CHEAP WEB HOSTING

Let’s take a look at the past and get to the bottom of how companies could afford to offer really cheap hosting, as well as shed light on the controversy of “unlimited” cheap hosting features.

How Did Cheap Web Hosting Start? A Quick History of Cheap Web Hosting

When the world wide web became open to the public in 1991, most websites were hosted on expensive and hard to setup web servers, or any computer used to “serve up” web pages to anyone requesting over the Internet. Then enterprising individuals saw a great commercial opportunity in building devoted web servers and renting out portions of their virtual space to anyone who would like to set up websites. They take care of the setup and maintenance of hardware and of giving technical support to these users, for a fee. Bluehost and Hostmonster were among the pioneers, having been founded in 1996.

This proved to be a very lucrative business model, especially when the web exploded and everyone wanted to get online. It was a sort of a “Wild West” market where anyone who could set up a web server and connect to the Internet could sell hosting space. (Hostgator, for example, began in 2002 as a 3-server setup in a dorm room).

In the following years, players from all over the world rushed into the scene. Today shared hosting is the most widely offered hosting service, with more than 4,000 global providers according to industry research firm Netcraft

What Makes Cheap Web Hosting Affordable? The Economics of Cheap Web Hosting

A web server can host as many as hundreds, even thousands, of websites as long as it has the right hardware specs and enough bandwidth to accommodate Internet traffic to and from the websites that reside in it.

It makes perfect business sense for a hosting operator to try to maximize a server’s capacity to the last byte. After all, running a hosting company involves a lot of time, money, and expertise.

One way these companies recoup their investment is by overselling (also called “overbooking”). This can be a good or bad practice depending on how the hosting company stays on top of the situation.

The idea behind overselling is simple: since not all users actually consume the server resources allotted to their account, there is plenty of unused capacity left over. Let’s say a server can hold 100 websites using their full storage and bandwidth allotment. On normal days, however, it appears only 10 sites consume peak capacity, and the rest barely exceed 10 percent. The cost of upkeep of the server remains the same, though. So what the operator does is to lease the extra unused capacity to, say, 50 more sites that hopefully would stay at the average 10 percent usage. The hosting operator therefore computes and sells server capacity based on actual average use, not full use.

The problem begins when the operator gets too greedy and tries to cram in as many customer accounts into a server and not bother to upgrade. It’s akin to a landlord renting out an increasingly dilapidated apartment building to more tenants than there are decent units, and he just keeps partitioning the spaces into smaller units to squeeze in more tenants. And yet this landlord doesn’t increase the water supply or build new units. You get the picture. That why we assure you that only the most reliable, legitimate and respected hosting providers are listed for you on WebHostingSearch to help you avoid such issues.   

Web hosting companies also make profit by upselling to you all kinds of little extras (domain names, email addresses, fancy site builders, business and online marketing tools, etc.) that tend to add up and raise your shopping cart total before you know it. Sometimes you might actually need these extras; sometimes, you absolutely don’t.

So it pays to be a savvy web hosting shopper – keep reading Webhostingsearch.com!

Does “Unlimited” Really Mean Having No Limits?

Many hosting providers offer “unlimited” diskspace, bandwidth, and other features in your account. Now the word choice is unfortunate, as this can be quite confusing to many buyers. Let’s set the record straight: web servers and their connection to the Internet have physical limits, so there’s no such thing as an “infinite” or “unlimited” storage or bandwidth.

As we’ve pointed out before, this is more of a marketing tactic rather than a literal description. “Unlimited” refers to the practice by hosting providers allocating more disk storage and bandwidth resources to than your account will normally need, rather than actual infinite access to these resources. This is handy when for example, you have a sudden spike of traffic to your blog than you usually have — your site will have breathing room and won’t crash, unless you greatly exceed your account limits.

READY TO CHOOSE CHEAP WEB HOSTING? YOUR NEXT STEP

Now that you understand a lot more how affordable web hosting works than the average person on the Internet, you’re better prepared to choose the perfect plan for you. We recommend doing next any one of these:

• Look through our list of best cheap hosts above. They’re all in one convenient place so you don’t have to keep looking all over anymore.
  
  
• Get acquainted with top hosting companies that offer great value for money, compared side by side.
  
  
• Want a broader but detailed search of hosting specs? Try our Advanced Hosting Search tool.