Hosting
If your website goes down your customers you’ve spent money advertising to get will see this screen. That’s your money wasted.
Super Cheap Hosting
If you’ve been thinking about getting a website and are torn between a lot of different options then I’d advise you against going the cheapest route. I’ve seen $1 offers a month and similar. I know someone who uses ridiculously cheap hosting and his site runs pretty slowly almost all the time. You can imagine it’s a nightmare for anything but the smallest of sites.
It’s an issue especially with shared hosting. You can’t expect to pay ridiculously low sums of money without them squeezing every last drop of performance from their servers. Let me go into a little more detail. You probably already know this, but to keep the price of hosting down nearly every company has more than one customer’s website on the same computer. Because the computer’s have a large amount of Internet connection bandwidth available, as well as memory and other important essentials, each website runs with excellent performance. However obviously the more you add, the more money the company saves but also the performance of your website is chipped away. Meaning that your site loads slowly no matter what Internet connection your customer may have. And it is also highly possible that a sudden burst of visitors to your or anyone else’s site could actually completely crash the computer. That means no-one on that computer has a website until the computer is restarted. Then the cycle could of course start over again.
Advertising
If you’re planning to advertise with a large network such as Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and so on, then to bid for the first page on some competitive keywords could cost you $10+ a click easily. Ask yourself why anyone would try and save a few bucks on hosting when you could be turning over hundreds of dollars weekly or daily. You certainly don’t want your web server to be a weak link in the chain and the difference between you making or losing money do you?
HostICan
I use HostICan for this and some other sites I have. It’s fast, reliable, and they have amazing support. How expensive you ask? It’s probably a little above average at a $6.95 a month for a basic setup, but it’s worth it. If you take the slightly more expensive shared hosting package it has a heck of a lot with it including unlimited bandwidth, databases and a whole host of features. There’s a lot of room to easily grow your site/sites. They also have VPS hosting and dedicated servers which you can obviously do pretty much anything with in terms of installing programs.
Uptime
Below is a screenshot of the average monthly uptime of HostICan from the review site www.webhostingstuff.com.
HostICan also guarantee to always have 99.9% or better uptime. On their site you can read “*If HostICan fails to provide 99.9% uptime, we will credit your account one month of hosting. Please see our terms and conditions for more information.”
Support
HostICan normally take a few minutes to maybe ten at maximum to reply. It’s not hard to fix any issues you might have.
More importantly is every once in a while they obviously do have to take their servers offline for maintenance and I’ve always had an email about it days before. It’s more than enough time to pause anything important you’re doing.
You can view a list of awards presented to the company from external bodies on HostICan’s site under Why Us -> View our Awards.
Discount
So apparently my discount code expired before :S. It’s now back if you want a $20 discount on shared hosting. Type HH-Hosting-12 as the discount coupon.
