Read more on "Is Cheap Web Hosting Worth It?"]]> There are literally dozens of companies that offer budget web hosting, and they all seem to offer similar deals.  They’re all under $10 a month, and they all claim to offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space, unlimited email addresses, free site building tools, etc.

However, if you run a serious web application, or a large online store that’s going to get a lot of traffic, these companies are probably going to let you down. The simple reason is that they’re not set up for this, and you definitely get what you pay for.

Now, if you just want to set up a few WordPress sites, then a budget web hosting company like JustHost is perfect – they have an easy cPanel control panel which allows you to install WordPress in minutes. They also often offer free Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising credits, which can help to get a new business off the ground.

However, here are some of the things that they don’t advertise on their front page:

• You share with a bunch of strangers – You don’t have your own server, so your data is stored on a virtual machine and a partition of a hard disk.  This means that not only can you not store cardholder data, but that you also might suffer if someone else who is sharing your server takes up a lot of space or bandwidth.
• If your website is successful, you might blow up the server – budget web hosts don’t typically figure on you getting a million visitors in a week, so if this happens to you, you could find that your website suddenly goes down.  It turns out ‘Unlimited Bandwidth’ usually only means “within reasonable limits” – the same goes for ‘Unlimited Disk Space’.
• There is a risk of property theft – not only from hackers who occasionally take advantage of budget web hosts’ security (which certainly isn’t lax, so don’t worry), but also from unscrupulous web hosts themselves.  There are stories, however few and far between, of a website suddenly becoming popular, only for the owner to find out that they’ve been locked out.  It doesn’t happen often, but you’ve been warned.

So What Are the Alternatives?

You have two alternatives to budget web hosting, both of which are more expensive:

1)     Cloud Web Hosting

Cloud hosting is something like halfway between budget hosting and dedicated hosting.  You pay for a dedicated virtual server, which can have any configuration you like and use any Linux or Windows distribution.  Your data is more secure, and you have less to worry about when it comes to bandwidth, space and server capacity.  Cloud web hosting is generally around 50%-100% more expensive than budget web hosting.

2)     Dedicated Servers

A dedicated server is usually only necessary if you run a large website that gets lots of traffic (and makes you at least some good money).  They can cost anywhere up to thousands of dollars a month (but some companies will start deals on a couple of hundred a month), and they take time and a lot of contracts to set up.

You have your own physical server, locked away in a secure fan-cooled room, with a real person standing by to fix it if anything happens.  The peace of mind, security, space, bandwidth and CPU power cannot be matched by any other type of hosting, and you’re guaranteed to have a much more stable, capable server.