Cheap web hosting is great, but there are a few things you should know before buying it. The most important thing, at least in my opinion, is that there are often traffic limits impossed on cheap web hosting servers. What that means is that if you have a site hosted on one of these servers, and you are getting a boatload of traffic, you may run into some problems down the road.
Even if the plan says it offers unlimited bandwidth, the vast majority of cheap web hosting providers will set a daily traffic limit. For 99% of people, this won’t be a problem. Unless you are getting more than a few thousand visitors each day, you shouldn’t have to worry. If you get more than a few thousand UV’s/day, I would suggest switching to a dedicated server or a VPS.
Most of problems with too much traffic come from inconsistent traffic. What I mean by that is that if you get 100 visitors one day and 5,000 the next day, you’re host is probably going to shut you down temporarily. You may be thinking “well, that would never happen!” – but the fact is it can, and it does. Especially if you are using social media for promotion, you can get massive surges of traffic (sometimes 50,000+ in a day), which will cause some serious problems with your cheap web hosting server.
Most cheap web hosting companies, at least the respectable ones (the ones featured on this site, for instance), will send you a warning before suspending your account. However, they usually don’t wait very long. It’s not that they are evil, it’s just that they are a business, and really, you are only paying them a few bucks a month, so why should they really care? Fortunately many of the more respectable hosts have back up servers for these situations, so I recommend sticking to the known hosts.
Written by Web Hosting Expert on May 25, 2009.
