Web hosting plans are not created equal. This is a universally recognized fact. As such, there are certain points you need to consider when looking for web hosting that will not only satisfy your needs, but be friendly on your budget as well.
1. Price
Almost always, price will be your foremost concern. You may be very excited to get your site up and running, but if your operational funds are limited you will need to carefully look around for the right service provider to match your meager resources.
2. Bandwidth
You want to ask yourself how much traffic allowance is afforded by inexpensive hosting plans. A number of really cheap plans are more generous with the allowance they offer than the more pricey ones, while others have less. You have to ensure that you pick a plan flexible enough to accommodate your site's traffic growth as you wouldn't want to be scampering for an upgrade once your site starts getting more and more visitors. Be aware that there are always web hosting providers that allow modest traffic with no extra charge.
3. Storage
Your next concern will have to do with storage space. You wouldn't want to get tied up to a plan that will not have room for the volume you intend your site to have. This is where comparing statistics helps. With proper research, you can always find affordable plans having huge capacity for storage.
4. Uptime
When doing your research, it is also imperative to look at a hosting provider's service record. Do they suffer from frequent downtimes? This should be a key consideration as nothing turns off visitors more than having to always encounter unavailable pages. This is one of the most common reasons for lost traffic. Web hosts need some time to do maintenance stuff, so a bit of downtime is natural, but make sure that these outages don't occur too often.
5. Additional Features
Your ability to review your site's traffic statistics is another vital concern. You should go with a provider that has this feature. Information pertaining to traffic statistics is a must-have as it helps in doing targeted advertising, and aids you in analyzing traffic quality. There are many affordable plans that offer user-friendly statistic reporting programs that provide users with pertinent data for more effective site management.
Other Important Things to Consider
Other hosting plan features you may want to consider availing include domain name registration and renewal. There are cheap web hosting providers that have these as part of their packages. This means one less chore to worry, so you definitely have to grab it if it's offered.
There are a lot of reputable web hosting companies that offer their services cheap. For very affordable monthly fees, you can get yourself great unlimited hosting service that is guaranteed, as well as be able to put up unlimited sites on the host's servers. In most cases, you won't even have to worry about any setup fees.
Searching for affordable web hosting plans will surely yield plenty of options to choose from. Always remember to make comparisons and be very particular with your site's growth potential. Traffic can only increase in the course of time, and you want to make sure that your affordable web host will be able to handle the surge, and remain reliable in the long run.