Cheap Domain Name Hosting - The Top 5 Things to Look For

When you are looking for cheap domain name hosting what you are looking for is a reliable web hosting company who is going to provide an excellent service at a very reasonable i.e. cheap price.

What you are specifically looking for will differ from the next person and so not every offer you see advertized will be exactly right for you so how do you assess the deals you see? Well fortunately there are some common features you should look out for. With these in place, you are at least 90% there because these will form the majority of what you need.


Now there are many of incredible deals on offer to you (believe it or not for as low as 1 cent for the first month!) so how are the hosting companies able to provide such great deals? Well the bigger hosting companies host hundreds of thousands if not millions of web sites. Every one of those customers is paying a monthly fee which very quickly adds up to a lot of money coming in. With such ready profits pouring in from their existing customer base, they can afford to offer new clients great deals.

So when you are faced with a barrage of deals to consider, here are the 5 things that you must look for when you are searching for cost effective and value for money cheap domain name hosting. If you get 4 out of 5 then you can score the candidate site as a "good" but what you are really looking for are sites that give you a 5 out of 5 rating them as an excellent potential provider.

The Top 5 Cheap Domain Name Hosting Features

1. Customer Service and Technical Support

We will start with this crucial feature which only comes into its own when you need it which is why it is so important to ensure it is in place when you invest in your hosting company. You want to ensure that the customer support team is accessible by email, live chat and telephone and that they are available 24 hours a day.

This availability is really important because your website needs to be available to your customers all day and every day and unfortunately problems don't always occur during working hours. A sneaky trick you could do is try contacting their customer support team before you sign up and see what their response is like. A quick search in forums and on review sites will also give you a good idea of the quality of their service.

2. How long have they been in business?

Sadly there are a lot of fly by night scam merchants out there, and whilst not every start up company is going to try and rip you off, signs that a company have only just begun trading online are indications to tread carefully. Trying to offer really cheap web domain hosting could simply be a ruse to draw you in (rare these days but possible).

A quick way to find out is to type "Who Is" followed by the company web address in a Google search. This will tell you what the creation date of the site was. Ideally they should have been in business for at least 2 years for you to have confidence they are a legitimate company - of course the longer the better.

3. Is limited bandwidth on offer?

Often overlooked as a limiting factor, bandwidth is a measure of the amount of data that can be sucked from your website over a period of time. Too many visitors consuming lots of data (e.g. hours of video streamed from your site) consumes a lot of bandwidth.

If you hit a limit imposed by your hosting company, then visitors to your site will not be able to access your content because effectively the site is shut off from the internet until you either pay an additional premium or the next bandwidth cycle starts.

If you get about 100,000 hits to a basic web page that will equate to approximately 1GB of bandwidth. Now rather than try and estimate how much bandwidth you will need, selecting a cheap domain name hosting company offering you unlimited bandwidth will remove this worry.

By the same token you want to ensure they also offer you unlimited disk space. Obviously the more disk space you have the bigger your site can be. With the explosion of online video and the expectation of visitors to see video on your site, your disk space requirements are going to be significant so having unlimited storage capacity will be a significant advantage for you.

4. A money back guarantee

There are two main reasons why you should look for a money back guarantee from a cheap domain name hosting company. The first is that it will give you confidence the hosting company are so sure of their performance they are willing to refund you if you are not happy (they wouldn't do that if their service was dreadful!) The second reason is that it will give you peace of mind to make the decision to invest in that particular company knowing you have the insurance to cancel and get your money back.

5. 99.9% Up time availability

99.9% is the industry standard and this means they are guaranteeing your site will be up all day, every day and over a year it may only be down for 8 hours. If there is any down time it is usually measured in seconds and minutes rather than hours so a guarantee like this is as close to 100% as you are going to get.

By reading this article you are probable someone looking to save money because you are searching for a cheap domain name hosting company. Be careful of being suckered in by free hosting services as they usually come with a range of hidden constraints likely to limit your website performance and possibly cost you more in the long run.

Good deals are out there if you know where to look and for just a few dollars a month you can have a very reliable cheap domain name hosting account that gives you everything you need - and more. So by looking out for these 5 features you will be able to find a great home for your domain and web site.



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