When you are looking for the best deal on anything, one thing the consumer usually keeps in mind is that it’s important not to go too far and sacrifice a great amount of quality for the cost. In some industries this can be trickier than in others, especially those that are seller’s markets.
The web hosting industry fortunately isn’t one of these. Costs have come down so far in relation to technological advances that finding good deals that you can rely on is not hard. Let’s list off some of the best of them. Keep in mind that prices and deals change rapidly, so if you find something that peaks your interest, act fast.
Web Hosting Hub
One of the first thing’s that you might be worried about with a budget host like Web Hosting Hub is that their customer service would suffer. This certainly seemed to be the case with a lot of the hosts we surveyed, but it wasn’t with Web Hosting Hub. Their customer service got rave reviews from our research, and it didn’t impact their cost. $3.95 per month gets you the usual list of “unlimited”s (disk space, bandwidth, email addresses, etc.), and their money back guarantee offer goes all the way up to 90 days.
InMotion Hosting
Also getting high marks in just about all areas is InMotion Hosting. Their “Launch” plan currently starts at $5.95 a month, and this gets you support for a long list of hosting software packages, including several types of streaming software, several spam filtering programs and multiple site design programs. The next account up, the Power Account at $7.95/month also gives you access to several shopping cart programs.
Arvixe
Quickly moving up in the world of discount web hosting is Arxive. Their library is filled with support for all types of software packages in all areas, and they offer it at a mere $4.00 month in either Linux or Windows hosting packages. They’ve received strong recommendations from their customer base in all areas.
Pacific Host
If you need to go even cheaper than the above hosts and still want to maintain that necessary level of quality, Pacific Host‘s Basic plan is available at $2.49/month with a three year plan. Though not among the largest web hosts they appear to be growing in number, and the reviews we did find gave them lots of thumbs up. Note that this is really a discount plan: you’ll want to go through the list of features to make sure it’s not missing anything you don’t need.
IX Web Hosting
Also coming in extra cheap is one of the big boys of web hosting, IX Web Hosting. With their current specials their shared hosting plans don’t go any higher than $7.95/month, and all of their account types are feature packed. The Unlimited Pro comes with 15 IP addresses and 10GB each of database and email account space. Their “Expert Hosting” plan at $3.99/month comes with nearly as many features.
It was once that inexpensive web hosting was something that a serious webmaster wanted to stay away from. The market has now swung the other way. You can now get it both ways: quality and frugality are no longer mortal enemies to the serious web site developers.
