Space: Unlimited
Traffic: Unlimited
Price: $6.95

Space: Unlimited
Traffic: Unlimited
Price: $3.95

Anyone surfing the web today will no doubt understand very quickly that there is a great demand for hosted content, and that there are many suppliers for this service. Much of the internet marketing and advertising dollars that drive ad campaigns are funded by the web hosts themselves always looking to expand their market share. Since there is a continual incline of new websites and web site owners, there is no obvious sight of web hosting about to plateau – in fact the demand for hosting is greater than ever, which has in turn spawned several new kinds of hosting options.

When we look at the phrase “Budget Hosting", we see that the two words are pretty broad in meaning. There are budgets of all sizes therefore making the literal term ambiguous, though when we see it generally we think “cheap". And of course hosting can mean any of the many kinds of web hosting available: image hosting, email hosting, even file servers and offsite data backup hosting. Again what we are referring to here is primarily web site hosting. There is an abundance of cheap web site hosting, even spilling into free site hosting in many facets. You would be hard pressed to not find a free blog host, for example. Between Blogger, Wordpress, MSN Spaces and Yahoo! You have a veritable cornucopia of choices to find one that best suits your needs there. Typical web site hosting can also be found for free – with a similar structure to the blogging environment, which requires advertising real estate at the top, bottom, or even in the content of your website space.

Our opinion however is that you would be much better off purchasing inexpensive hosting space from an experienced hosting company such as Hostgator or LunarPages. You can easily obtain several gigabytes of disk space and more bandwidth than any normal web site could possibly need for less than $10.00 a month. The efficiency and advancement of server technology is making web hosting in general a completely affordable experience. With this information in mind, all you need to do next is decide what kind of web site you need, and what kind of platform you need to have to support your site.

Will you be building an Ecommerce website, or require your information be accessed only after your visitors have subscribed to your site? Membership-based sites are increasing in numbers in an attempt to ward off phishing and Spam trollers. If your web site will be keeping track of visitors, their preferences, or email addresses – you’ll need a host that provides you with access to a database structure where you can save this information and retrieve it quickly. Most web hosts offer a flavor of mySQL or Microsoft SQL Server. Though you may end up paying additional fees for the Microsoft version – in both cases you will have a robust database server to safely store your critical information. Both data storage options support connectivity with PHP, one of the newer standards in interactive web programming – competing passively with Microsoft’s .NET framework.

You will be able to find an abundance of helpful tools and resources with your Budget Web Hosting, including: A Web Control Panel, FTP and Email Access, Dedicated IP Address and Technical Support. Your control panel software which runs in the web browser and hosted by your web host, will give you a window into your server and let you change settings, create accounts for FTP and Email. You will also be able to add sub domains and additional hosted domains, if your account supports multi-domain hosting. You will use your FTP account to move files from your web designer to the spot on the web server for the entire world to see, and your email is of course a staple in any hosting account. Although you are likely on a server with many other web-hosting clients, you will have a dedicated IP address. There are several great reasons for this, one of which is SEO related and we will cover that Choosing a Stats Package topic in our SEO and Marketing pages.

Possibly the most crucial aspect of your web hosting account is the technical support. This is the one feature you hope to never need, but when the time comes, fast acting technicians on the hosting side can mean the difference between site failure and site recovery. Ultimately your site success relies upon you web site staying up and visible, meaning that your web server needs to be properly maintained. Any reliable host will perform software and operating system updates at regular intervals – with little interruption of service. Similarly, you should receive a email with updated expectations of any scheduled down time to properly plan for such an occurrence. In most scenarios your down time, if any, is minimal and are typically performed in the wee hours of the morning, when web site traffic is at its minimum.

Budget Hosting, is it a good thing? Yes, it definitely is.