How do you know if cheap website hosting is offering quality?
When you’re creating a website, it can be easy to forget how important website hosting is, especially with so many other areas to consider. The website builder, the domain name, the branding and marketing, whether to include a blog or an online store
the list goes on. But while you don’t want to break the bank, finding the right cheap hosting is one of the most important elements to getting your website up and running, and is closely connected to how successful it will be overall. This is because your cheap web hosting is strongly linked to your user experience.
When you are looking for cheap web hosting in Canada, you need to consider the bandwidth, which will decide how quickly your pages load. Studies have shown that visitors will abort the search if your web page takes as little as 3 seconds to load. One great tip is to try out your page loading times on different devices such as tablets and mobile phones, as more than 50% of browsing is no longer done via desktop computer.
Another thing to think about is the level of customer service you will be receiving. Cheaper website hosts may sometimes offer less than 24/7/365 customer support, or perhaps ask you to rely on a ticket system rather than a phone line or a live chat function. If your website goes down in the middle of the night, you want to be able to get it sorted quickly. Take note of the time zone that your company of choice is based in. It might have sounded like cheaper hosting than a competitor, but once you factor in long distance phone calls you may be changing your tune.
What are the minimum technical features I need to find with cheap hosting?
This question really depends on what you will be building your website for. While a simple blog may not need much in the way of technical extras, if you are building an online store you will want to make sure you are being offered a dedicated IP address and a private SSL. This gives a secure layer of added protection between any personal data your visitors input and the rest of the shared server.
If you are hoping to use programming and scripting for your website, (or have a developer in mind to do it for you) you will also need to make sure that your cheap website hosts support these and have the latest versions too. As a basic guide, you would expect your hosting service to offer FTP, SSL, PHP, Perl, .htaccess, telnet, SSH, MySQL, CGI, and Ruby on Rails.
If you want a professional touch to your website, you may also want to find a host who provides email accounts at your domain name.
