GoodBudgetHostings.com

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There are a few things I need to tell you about choosing a hosting service.  They come basically from my personal experience, a personal web publisher’s views.

-Do not rush.  Take your time and do your homework carefully.  Too many times I’ve told myself "If only I’d seen this before…" .  And you bet I wasted too much time and money for that.  While the services posted on this website are good and reputable, some may fit you better than others.

-Do not sign up until you really need to.  Special offers come all the time.  More than once that providers increased features just hours or days after I’d signed up.

-Try contacting their customer service.  Asking them about their price, services, discounts, technical questions, or whatever.  By this you can evaluate their promptness to serve YOU.  This may not guarantee they’ll be still good after the sale, but if they suck from the start…well, you know.

-Make use of their money-back guarantee.  Most of them give you 30-day guarantee, some even give you almost 100 days to try!  During the period, if you have access to server status reports (hosted with a good company and you should), look at information like server load, memory usage, etc.  It gives you some idea how well (or not so well) the service is doing.  Also try ‘whoising‘ your domain, and find out how many other sites are on the same server with you.  You don’t want it to be too populated.

This is a picture of a service report from a cheapo hosting.  Their server load stays at least three most of the time.  Lately it came to twenty that I couldn’t even update my sites!	Another service report from a reputable hosting.  Server load is usually under one, and look at the number of CPUs on the server.  There are about 30 sites hosted on this server, compared to almost 400 on the server on the left.

-Please be reasonable.  You don’t expect an $18,000 Corolla to be of the same quality as an S-Class Mercedes, do you?  While the Toyota is a good car, it is no MB.  The same logic applies to hosting service.  Ones with a dollar or two a month are good but you should expect more downtime, slower speed, etc. than a seven-dollar a month service.  By accepting this fact, you can be a happy customer.  I used these services, and believe me, they weren’t that bad, especailly for starters.

-There’s no such thing as ‘unlimited’ whatsoever.  When a company says they give unlimited something, they actually mean they give you a very high limit for that resource.  But if you’re a really high roller, be prepared to receive a notice from them!  After all, using up unresonably high amount of resources on a shared server is unfair to your ‘neighbor’ sites.

-Look at what you NEED not what you WANT.  A 100 MB space and few GB traffic/month is more than enough for one full-featured, moderately large, database-driven website containing forum, blog, catalog, etc.  You don’t need more than this per one site, UNLESS you’re running a download or a multimedia-dependent site.  In that case, most of the companies won’t be happy with you being on a shared server and will persuade you to move to a dedi or semi-dedi (VPS).  Good hosting companies should do that, in my opinion, to maintain their level of service for other sites on the same server.

-Personally, I don’t care much about the email features coming with hosting accounts.  In case you don’t know, you don’t need a hosting account to run your own custom email.  (I know some people who do that.)  You can always use Google Apps which is a free service and only requires that you own a domain.  I sign up for every domain I own and enjoy having email addresses like me@goodbudgethostings.com with Gmail features, including 5 GB mailbox/address, extraordinary spam filter and IMAP.  Yes, Gmail has IMAP service for a few months now.  See details at Google Apps. 

Well, that’s all I can think of by now.  This list of advices is growing and I’m sure to write more when I come up with another issue.