Features you should not save on when it comes to webhosting
Most people when they are looking for webhosting look for the cheapest option they can find. Certainly there are ways that you can keep the cost of hosting down but you do have to be careful. There are certain features that you cannot afford to skimp on when it comes to web hosting.
The most important feature that you cannot afford to skimp on when it comes to your webhosting is security. Without adequate security you are putting your site at risk. The problem with a lot of the low cost web hosts is that they don't have the resources to provide proper security. They have to cut out something in order to keep the costs down and since security is a major expense for most web hosts this is where they usually try to reduce their costs. Unless you are building a site that you are not worried about losing you have to make sure that you get good security from your web host.
The other big thing that you can't afford to skimp on when it comes to a web host is reliability. There is little value to having a site if it is down all the time. The reliability of a lot of the cheap web hosts is not good and this can really hurt your business. If a potential customer goes looking for your site and they find that is down it is very unlikely that they are going to come back. Every time this happens it costs you money, far more than you saved by going with the cheap hosting.
You are also going to want to make sure that the site that you have has good customer service, most of the cheaper ones don't. This is again down to costs, it is expensive to employ people to answer your phones or emails and address your problems. This is made even worse by the fact that the cheap web hosts tend to be the least reliable. The result is that there are a lot of people trying to contact a very small number of customer support staff. This means that it could take a long time to get your issues addressed.
It is also generally not a good idea to go with a webhost that won't allow you to upgrade your service. A lot of the cheaper web hosts will only offer one level of service. This may be fine when you first start your site but as you grow it may prove to be inadequate. Most of the better hosting companies will allow you to add disk space and bandwidth as necessary when your site grows. The cheap ones can't do this which means that as your site grows you will have to move it to a different host.