How cheap is “really cheap”?
Many times we chose a web hosting service relying on nothing but an advert or a banner that leads to a particular host company. In most cases, this banner or any sort of advertisement contains the price, which of course plays a significant role in choosing our DSN management.
So, the smaller is the price, the more it attract us, but… You should always look what you get for this price and what are the conditions. I will give you an example:
Host Excellence is cheap, among the cheapest hosts you are expected to find, only 2,95$ per month. Surely even a beginner webmaster can allow it. On the other hand, HostGator is (compared to Host Excellence) is feasibly expensive - 9,95$. So, if we want a “cheap” host, we will go with the first option, right? But now lets see what are the TOS and what do you get for this price…
Host Excellence basic plan gives 2,95$ only if you sign up bi-annually in advance, which not many like to do, (that is a total of 70,80$). If you decide to go “only” on an annual basis, the price would be 3,95$ + 25$ set up fee (which leads us to a total of 72,40$, but this time only for one year!). And what do we get? 5GB space / 50GB transfer and one domain hosted, which mean you cannot host more TLD’s on this account.
Now let’s go to HostGator’s shared 9,95$ plan and see where are the catches. As expected the price is also valid only for annual payment in advance (not bi-annual). You get 100GB f space and 1000GB bandwidth, plus the ability to host unlimited domains.
In other words, lets take bandwidth into account as normally been a bigger issue for website owners: 50GB costs 6,03$ (we added the fee set up to the total due and divided by 12), and 1000GB costs 9,95$. We don’t even need to keep diving it in order to see the cost per GB.
This is how you should calculate the cost of “cheap” hosting service before you sign up and see if this is indeed a low priced webhosting, or is it just a cheap way to present it..?
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