Cheap web hosting: which one should you choose?

Cheap web hosts frequently use outdated or defective servers and/or cram in as many users as they can. As a result, each user's portion of the available resources is drastically decreased.

For example an 8 GB RAM server. If we put 100 users into that server, each user will receive about 80 MB of RAM (8 x 1000 / 100). If you put more users on the same server, users will have less RAM and issues will arise.

Hard disks for servers are typically more expensive than those for desktop computers.

This is a result of their increased average life, faster performance, and higher reliability.

Any hard drive has a limited lifespan because as a resource, it degrades.

This indicates that the hard disk's risk of failing dramatically increases after the set lifetime, along with the performance declining below acceptable levels. In other words, a hard drive should be disposed of once it has reached its specified lifetime. But with affordable web hosting providers, that's not the case. They'll keep using those decrepit old hard drives.

Can you rely on a free domain name or do you have to pay extra for it? Without a domain name you will not be able to launch your site or have an email account with your site name.

Is there a free SSL certificate to protect your site? An SSL certificate is now essential to getting indexed on search engines. Even if there are free SSL certificates available out there, it's sometimes just more practical for it to be included in your hosting because it is easier to set up and connect to your web hosting.

Are backups or snapshots included? Most often, brand-new users don't know how crucial website backups are. In order to maintain your website, you should be able to rely on built-in or automated back up capabilities.

That means that the site host is responsible for backups. Every reputable server will regularly make backups of your website or snapshots and store them so that you can come back to this version if anything happens.

Site backups are a basic feature of affordable web hosting services, but it's unlikely that a free or extremely inexpensive web host would perform regular backups. Even if they do, there will be unreasonable size restrictions and limited backup storage time. They might even charge you for restoring a backup!

With cheap web hosting, the response time to a ticket is going to be long and likely not that great.

A lot of users will have comparable issues and there will not be many support agents to answer. Plus they won't be experts and might not be able to assist you with even relatively easy hosting problems.
They might just send you documentation links, and many "free" hosting sites rely on an automatic chatbot for their support.

The servers are maintained by backend technicians, who do everything from connecting the wires to installing OS updates and security. Skilled server administrators are quite expensive and low-cost hosts try to avoid that expense. However, downtimes are an inevitable part of the shared hosting industry.

The best web hosts use sophisticated software to mitigate these effects. However, with cheap web hosting services, you'll be subject to insufficient and even subpar server resources.

You should expect, then, frequent and lengthy downtimes if you combine these subpar resources with untrained technicians.

Security is one area that beginners regrettably neglect. The web hosting provider is responsible for the security of your data, but some cheap web hosting service have terrible security measures.

Even small business websites can be exposed to a variety of attacks due to overly simple firewalls, a lack of virus security, and no defense against DDoS attacks.

A notable example is the insertion of malicious code. There's a well known technique in which hackers insert malicious code via MySQL injection into databases by swiftly identifying security gaps in the data.

As a result, without your knowledge, your website picks up viruses. A single malware assault can cause the server's entire database instances to get infected if it only has one database server and no backups. That would mean every single website hosted on that database server would be impacted. As a result, if another person's website is compromised, you might also experience the effects.

Datacenters outside France or Europe do in fact cost less to the host on but this can cause problems with the protection of your data and the privacy of your customers' data. Rules and regulations in other jurisdictions may not be as strong.