But there are many great things in life that you really need to pay for in order to acquire. This is true mostly with new
stuff like gadgets, cars, and whatnot.

To get the best, you have to shell out some money. When it comes to webhosting this may be true because free webhosting services are great for a small site starting out.

However once a site gets busy and is growing, the free option is not really recommended, particularly for ecommerce websites
. The reason why is because free webhosting companies usually cannot provide three important things: a good up-time guarantee, good support turnaround time, and quality customer service. You get what you pay for.

Good and Realistic Up-time Guarantee

A good webhosting service should be able to provide a realistic up-time guarantee. While most free webhosting services may indeed promise to keep your website throughout the year, they usually do not have enough resources to guarantee this.

Free webhosting services are a bargain for a small hobby site, but are bound to be subject to glitches and technical problems and you cannot really complain as much since your not paying for their service anyway. The service is free and ranting does not make much of a difference unlike for paid companies who see you as a customer that should be king (or queen) rather than just a free member.

Of course paid webhosting services may also be subject to some technical glitches – they do get downtime sometimes, but since they have more resources to deal with problems, they can guarantee a better downtime than free services. Plus since you are paying you can demand customer service. Realistically, paid webhosting services may not be able to guarantee 100% downtime, but they can guarantee up to 99.9% downtime, which is pretty good compared to how much free services can promise. Because of this, free webhosting services are not really recommended especially for business websites that require their sites to be up and running at all times, or at least 99% of the time.

Good Support Turnaround Time

Another important thing that a webhosting service should make available for their clients is a good support turnaround time. Webhosting services should be able to respond to your inquiries as fast as possible. If you encounter problems like downtime and send an inquiry or request to your web host, you need them to respond immediately, or else your website and your business might be compromised.

You might not be able to expect this from free services. You didn’t pay so why should they jump when you say so? At the most you can expect them to have only web-based or email inquiry aside from a preset troubleshooting FAQ page. While these could suffice for minor problems, they may not work for dire situations where you need immediate action.

There are a number (around thousands) of business webhosting services you can find online. These business hosting sites offer a number of features some even unfamiliar to you such as Miva Scripting, co-location services, virtual private servers, redundant backbone connection and many others. You must define your aim. And ask why you need a business webhosting company? This way you will only look for the services that you truly need for your business webhosting. And you will not end up paying for the services that you do not actually need.

A business webhosting site can fetch as low as $40 – $50 a month to thousands of dollars. The price range will usually depend on the dedicated servers and bandwidth capacity. Choosing a business webhosting service is a major consideration. This is because a down site or down time usually mean your business is down too.

You must consider a number of factors before committing to a business webhosting service. One factor is a business webhosting service must offer a money back, no questions guarantee. Another is an uptime guarantee. You should also consider the types of backups
they offer. A business webhosting service should have redundant backbone connections to the internet or connected to the internet by more than one major backbone providers. A business webhosting service must offer 24-7 technical, phone and email support. You should also check the background of the business webhosting service, how long they have been in business and do they have business references of sites that they host. Also, a webhosting vendor should also make it easy for you to upgrade/down services. And finally, know if the webhosting service requires monthly or annual payments.

First, we will list the contenders who have made it into my top five: 1&1 Hosting, Yahoo Hosting, iPowerWeb, LunarPages, and DreamHost. In order to make the list, the companies had to be competitively priced, provide 24/7 support, and have atleast a 99% uptime. Any webhosting company that doesn’t have those three things doesn’t deserve a look. That said, this list has been significantly reduced for your convenience, highlighting five companies that I believe deserve a look for different reasons.

Our first webhost review involves 1&1 Hosting, the largest webhost by customers, and for a long time with number of domains as well. The 1&1 hosting price is what is so lucrative: $2.99 a month for webhosting is amazing then to top it off the $2.99 1&1 hosting plan offers 1 free domain name, 5 GB space with 250 GB bandwidth. For budget webhosting, 1&1 hosting is definitely the way to go.

Next up, Yahoo Hosting, a company that was conceived for the Internet is now hosting it. Yahoo has many smart features including one that will install WordPress for you! WordPress it the most famous blogging software, and Yahoo Hosting will setup the process for you. Yahoo Hosting also comes with a free Akismet license, which is an anti-spam filter for your blog. If you host with someone else you’ll have to pay the $5/mo fee! That’s just the tip of the iceberg, my favorite feature is the “site snapshots” which backup the changes to your website every 4 hours. You can restore back to any of the site snapshots easily.

Our third webhost, iPowerWeb, is a large small webhost. By that, we mean they haven’t received quite the large publicity of the other webhosting companies, but are a relatively large in the webhosting industry, and certainly deserving of big-name recognition. iPowerweb offers one of the best domain name deals around. At $2.99 for the first year, domains have never been so inexpensive. iPowerWeb is also very personal with their customers; you will have an account executive assigned to you, who will take care of your every need, just like a good waiter.

LunarPages won my attention in 2001, with the Los Angeles blackout during which they maintained operability. While perhaps server uptime during a national disaster may not be a high priority for you; for many, including myself it’s an insurance policy all into itself. That said, it speaks well for uptime when there isn’t a blackout or disaster. LunarPages also has been one of the first of the support-driven smaller companies to take a price dive, from the industry standard of $7.95 to $6.95 a month.

Then finally there is DreamHost, who while lacking a competitive price makes the list because of their offering VPN service, and Ruby on Rails support. Those two services are a must for many small businesses, and the DreamHost webhosting plans are still a fraction of the normal cost for those webhost services.

With a number of webhosting companies on the internet, it is sometimes hard to find the one that offers true cheap and quality webhosting. Before, you began to search for companies that offer cheap webhosting, it is important to know what exactly you are looking for. This includes your site features, internet programming languages, database connectivity features, email addresses, domain name, traffic you expect and many other considerations.

Some cheap webhosting services offer ‘unlimited bandwith’. This is a false claim since ‘bandwith’ refers to the amount of information between the hosting servers and the end user. Another important consideration in choosing a cheap webhosting is its support services. You must know how prompt the cheap webhosting company can address the problems you encountered. Do some research on the webhosting company’s website. Know how long they have been in operation. Then know if the company offers the service you are looking for.

If you purchase your own domain name, make sure that the cheap webhosting company supports them and they give you 1 email address. A number of companies offer 10 or more custom pop email accounts with unlimited forwarding address with sometimes no additional costs.

Linux based cheap webhosting services are usually cheaper that Windows, offers PHP and MySQL and telnet accounts. Linux is often used by cheap webhosting companies because Linux based languages and databases are free to install. Windows are usually more expensive that Linux, should support ASP, could have Cold Fusion, Access, SQL Server at additional cost.

It is hard to find cheap webhosting using Windows since it is expensive for a hosting company to purchase. Cold Fusion, Allair, SQL Server need to be purchased at quite a high price. Access is sold at a very minimal price. If you are looking for extra features in your Windows host then you should be ready to pay extra. If you are looking for a cheap webhosting service, then a Linux based service would be the one for you. However, if you are using Microsoft Access databases, a Windows based hosting service with Access support is a requirement.

The term unlimited may be compared to the service that you can get — more bandwidth and other perks like numerous email accounts which you will need for your business. Shutting a server down will not happen since these web hosting services are offering big storage spaces to handle the volume of data that you need.

Unlimited web hosting is more or less like the advertisement of some fast food joints that cater an eat-all-you-can promo. You have to stop somewhere right? Otherwise, you’d end up throwing up on the table or getting rushed to the hospital for overeating.

The most important deal to consider for this kind of marketing campaign is would the web hosting company be able to provide you with 100% uptime website hosting, could they support all your customer service inquiries and could they offer you all the resources that you need to make your website compatible across all browsers.

When people were new to CSS codes, the only browser you can use is Internet Explorer. Which if you viewed a website which was created via the drag and drop capabilities of Front Page, you will just see hoards and hoards of Wingdings and Webdings if you choose to view your website using Safari or Mozilla Firefox.

Yahoo! has started to offer unlimited web hosting and at first, their customers went crazy over this great idea. After they have digested and understood what Yahoo! was really offering, their blood pressures went back to normal levels.

The unlimited web hosting that they offer included unlimited disk space, data transfer, email storage, up to 1,000 email accounts, a vast array of web design tools, free domain name and most especially, an automatic submission of your company’s site to top search engines.

So this does not mean that by availing the unlimited hosting services you can use storage space until kingdom come. It just talks about the rate in which you can use the storage space before being responsible in crashing the main server.

There are countless number of hosting companies offer unlimited hosting packages but only few actually provide what they promise. Some promise the world and provide nothing while a handful of companies concerned about maintaining their reputation just don’t talk to talk but walk to walk as well.

Shared webhosting is housing and serving files for a web site. For individuals or small to medium scale businesses that cannot afford to gain an extreme robust connection to the internet for their web site on their own. This is where the virtual or shared webhosting businesses come in. They provide the customers a way to outsource their Internet requirements in a more affordable way.

The shared webhosting service allows individuals and companies to share the cost of a fast Internet connection for serving files. This is the basic, entry-level fee-based hosting service available to the customer. Shared webhosting allows clients to host their website on a powerful server at a minimal monthly cost. Shared webhosting provides individual sites with connectivity and guaranteed uptime. Shared webhosting is designed to host small-scale e-commerce sites web pages. Shared webhosting is used by first-time webmasters because you can have a reliable Web presence without having advanced technical know-how. Shared webhosting is good for small-scale consumer because they are assured of transparent services, domain name for its website and set of email addresses.

Shared webhosting’s low cost makes it very attractive to the consumers. A minimal monthly fee for a shared webhosting service is preferable than a dial-up service. Most small-scale business and individuals choose shared webhosting because of its low price and it provides basic services. Another reason for shared webhosting popularity is its convenience. Site activation and set-up time in shared webhosting usually takes a few minutes after purchasing the services.

Shared webhosting services are usually bundled. With a minimal monthly fee, it offers multi-platform website solutions. Bundled services include: minimum amount of disk storage space for web pages, minimum amount of data transfer, email forwarding services with physical email boxes that allows you email aliases at your domain name, unlimited file transfer protocol (FTP) services. Shared webhosting alos provide access to Web statistics for you to gage the number of internet clients visiting your web site. This service usually includes raw statistical logs. Also, shared webhosting will include free 24X7 technical supports.

Other services in a shared webhosting are daily tape backup of web site, anonymous FTP server for you to provide public access via file transfer protocol format and CGI-BIN access to upload

scripts that will add features to your website.

Shared webhosting is truly a great way to avail of fast internet connection for your website at a very minimal monthly cost.