Sunday, 2 October 2011

Identifying Budget Hosting With Good Uptime

When the economy is not doing so well, every single cent counts. Due to uncertain times, budget hosting is becoming more and more popular. Business owners who are looking to start new businesses or to expand their existing businesses can now sign up for hosting that cost less than $10 a month. Let's quickly explore the benefits of having a web presence.

Businesses that have been depending on offline advertising like print media or TV advertising can now tap on the potential on the Internet. The Internet offers an incredible amount of savings. For example, a business owner doesn't have to pay thousands of dollars upfront for advertising. Using pay per click advertising, traffic can be generated on a per click basis. That means the business owner only pays when a web visitor clicks on an ad and visits the website.

However, to reap the benefits of having a website, the site has to be up 24/7. If an individual signs up with a hosting company that offers poor uptime, the business may suffer in the long run.

Budget hosting is usually offered in a shared hosting environment. That means your site will be hosted together with hundreds of websites -- all sharing the same server resources. There wouldn't be any problem sharing resources if all sites are just static websites that don't hog resources unfairly. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Sometimes, one or two webmasters may decide to host a resource intensive site on the same server, and that may bring down the entire machine, thus affecting uptime.

The nature of the web hosting industry has always been a competitive one. Therefore, instead of raising prices to cope with such issues, many hosting companies have developed solutions to deal with the challenges. Here are some tips on how you can identify good hosting companies that offer reliable budget hosting.

Tip 1: Comprehensive monitoring features.

Expert IT engineers should be able to monitor the performance of the servers. If there is any indication of resource abuse, they will then be able to respond promptly. Sites that are causing problems may be removed temporarily so that other websites are not adversely affected.

Tip 2: Solid reputation.

Reliable hosting companies tend to have positive reputations. Go visit hosting forums or review sites and you will hear nothing but great comments about their services. A company can only acquire a positive reputation if they can deliver on their promises. So this is a reliable indication of performance.

Tip 3: Responsive support.

Every hosting company faces downtime every now and then. But the companies that respond quickly are the ones that set themselves apart from the rest of the pack. When a server goes down, you can count on the support team to rectify the problems quickly.

Tip 4: Use your own server monitoring service.

There are free and paid services out there that can monitor server uptime. Whenever there is downtime, you get an email alert immediately. When the server goes online again, you get another email notification. You can use such services to gauge the reliability of the hosting services offered by different companies.

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