It’s only natural for us to want to spend as little as possible for things, but with low cost web hosting, there are a few items you’ll want to make sure are taken care of as part of the bargain. It will do you absolutely no good to have a cheap web hosting plan at the expense of your site’s visibility, security and viability on the Web. Let’s look at several must-haves even for a low cost web hosting solution!

-   Decent Web Space and Bandwidth – You should have enough server space to be able to not only have a website of decent size, but to be able to send and receive email, and conduct any of the transactions you might expect a fully functional site to offer. On really low cost accounts, the area and limited bandwidth quickly become an issue. Make sure you are not being shortchanged in this regard, or you (and possibly any visitors you may have) might be in for a surprise down the line.

-  Server Uptime – The percentage of how much a server is available online, (and thus your site) is expressed numerically as server uptime. Anything less than 99.8% is not acceptable. Every server has outages, but with the advent of cloud hosting capabilities, this should be changing for the better very soon. Still, even now there are too many companies who do this well to be stuck with one who doesn’t!

-  Server Security – Having your site either hacked, or spammed to death is a fate wished on no one, and the truth is that on shared web hosting accounts, server security would fall to your web hosting company to ensure. Servers need to be secure, and software updates need to happen to make sure that your web hosting space is as hostile to hackers and spammers as possible. These are questions you want to ask of even a low cost web hosting company.

-  Adequate Support – Higher paying clients get better support options, and this is probably how it should be. However, a certain level of basic support is expected, and you should be able to get questions answered and problems resolved within 24 hours, tops. Anything more, and you may need to move on. Obviously, phone support would be best, but if live chat is offered, and your emails are answered promptly, then you should be okay with that arrangement.

-  Not Oversold – It starts benignly, with a touch of slowdown, and soon escalates into a full-blown delay. Soon visitors are giving up on your site because it takes too long to load. Search engines, (in particular Google) are dinging your search ranking for poor server speed, and things go downhill fast. This is often a case of the web host overselling the web space and bandwidth.

Find a low cost web hosting solution that passes the test on all five of these points, and you’ve got the best of both worlds!