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I’ve been burned by "low cost/cheap hosting" before, so the first thing to state is that to select the right provider is tricky and might require several iterations. Different sites have different demands and what will work for one will not work for another. Also qualification of webmasters doffer. Some are accomplished Unix administrators, some are professional programmers and some are just HTML writers. As for low price, you need to see the whole price range and remember that free cheese is usually a sign of a mousetrap.
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The most common practice among We hosting providers is overselling. The latter is defined in Wikipedia as
'Overselling or Overbooking refers to the selling of a volatile good or service in excess of actual capacity. Overselling is a common practice in the travel and lodging industry. In telecommunications, sometimes the term oversubscription is preferred. The practice occurs as an intentional business strategy where sellers expect that some buyers will not consume all of the resources they are entitled to, or that some buyers will cancel, the practice of overselling ensures that 100% of available supply will be used resulting in the maximum return on investment.
Cutthroat competition led to misleading advertisements and "race to the bottom" in prices so you need to be very careful selecting provider and monthly price should not be the only or primary factor. For example if you store content in databases then CPU limits will hit you first, before bandwidth limits. Headaches in case you went to a wrong provider cost much more then $24-$48 per year you can save by going from $7-8 per month provider to $5 per month provider. It is easy to get into this "cheapest" trap by $24 difference is just the cost of on lunch or so. Real cost for you due to troubles with provider, in case you have site with substantial traffic, can be in hundreds, if not thousand dollars in your time and lost revenue. If, for example, you have substantial AdSense revenue then it might be prudent to select "business" hosting (which costs $12-$20 per month as traffic on low cost plans can be "shaped". In any case you should not believe advertised specs for the account, if only for the reason outlined in Bandwidth Mathematics.
The best value is usually in the middle price range, not on lower of high end. There are three major classes of cheap hosting:
For basic plan traffic should be "medium" and that means less the 50G a month. The rule of thumb is that you can't get more the 10G of bandwidth per each dollar of monthly payment (or $0.1 per gigabyte). That means that for $6 per month you can't exceed $60G quota on a regular basic. If you double that the chances are that are abusing hospitality and bumping you out is not reasonable for a "cheap" hosting provider :-). Forget about traffic in the 1000G a month in this price range range and this type of accounts. That range needs a dedicated server (real or virtual) and should cost you around $200 a month for a real server, less for virtual. If you truly want reliability and good uptime, you need either to raise your budget, or to lower your bandwidth requirements. Unlimited bandwidth advertisement is just a sign of cutthroat competition in this segment and you should not believe them one bit.
Note that SSH access attracts various "deviant" users and to cater to this user segment is a dangerous decision. Requesting additional documents about you before providing SSH access is just a common sense. And the demand for this type accounts is high: it is really difficult to maintain a complex or large (over 100M of content or several similarly sized databases) website without shell access even is you do not need a lot of server side scripting; it is definitely close to impossible with Cpanel or Vdeck). That means that a lot of successful sites quickly outgrow "basic" model and need an upgrade to "shared hosting".
If we assume full depreciation in in three years then without the cost of bandwidth you need to get $136 a month just to get even.
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Linux CentOS
• RAM: 1 GB
• Storage: 20 GB‡‡
• Bandwidth: 500 GB/mo
Choose Your Term: 1 mo: $29.99/mo, 6 mos: $29.99/mo, 12 mos: $26.99/mo, 24 mos: $23.99/mo
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$30 Xen hosting 768M/30GB/300GB
Linode Galloway, NJ 609 593 7103
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The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is a non-profit organization that gathers and reports information on business reliability. According to the BBB website, Dot5 Hosting has a rating of F.
FreeBSD based provider; $3.88 plans
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Overselling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
