What are you paying for?

What you pay for, is essentially what you get. If you are using a free blog hosting plan, you can’t expect much freedom to do what you want. Conversely, If you are paying big bucks for a dedicated server, you will expect and demand excellent service, as well you should. There isn’t a big difference in price for standard hosting plans between the major players. They all seem to be pretty good at what they offer. But beware, the bigger the price doesn’t always get you a better product. Take for example, if you are new and don’t know much about building a website, a site builder with many templates might be the way to go. But you will pay more per month than a regular host will charge. The going rate on average is between $15 and $25 per month. Also, you might not want to lock yourself into a plan for a year because, you may get tired of the limits you will have with such a site.

Once you get more familiar with websites you might out grow the standard templates and designs that type of host is offering. You also won’t be able to have multiple domains hosted for the same price. With a regular hosting plan your options are almost limitless in the way of design and content management. For example, if you are looking for a blog platform it is hard to beat WordPress. If you are looking at high end flashy websites it’s tough to find anything better than Joomla or Drupal. No site builder hosts that I know of have any way for you to use those services. Not only will you end up with a nicer looking, more functional website, but it will be quite a bit cheaper as well. I won’t even discuss dedicated or virtual servers right now, I will leave that for another day.

Also beware of the really cheap hosting companies for the simple fact that you will be just another sale on a long list of other sales. Cheaper, in life as well as hosting is seldom better. The old saying goes “You get what you pay for”. There are so many things to say about this topic that I will put it into other articles on another day as well.

Need hosting that is worth looking at? See one of the best hosting companies available.