When considering a budget host, consumers must realize
that the options that they will receive will be
tremendously limited. Budget hosting is usually
priced between $2 to $25 per month. This cheap pricing
makes Web hosting more accessible to consumers who
want to obtain an Internet presence for their individual
interests or for the purposes of experimentation.
Lower price schemes however guarantee
that the quality level of the hosting will be
less than stellar. Budget hosts can offer low
prices because most take a "no-frills," bulk approach
towards hosting. All budget hosts leverage shared
hosting, in which numerous customer resources
are multiplexed upon a single server.
In the case of most budget hosts,
many hundreds of customers are located upon single
servers or hosting appliances. The net result
is that consumers experience a tremendous amount
of service degradation in respect to server performance
and network efficiency. With a multitude of consumers
sharing a single server, any access to service
is determined on a first-come, first-serve basis.
In effect, consumers compete for all accessible
services. Usually, this competition results in
a tremendous amount of server load which causes
tremendously slow execution of applications on
the server, and high levels of latency, or network
delay. Most budget hosts therefore cannot guarantee
24/7 uptime due to server load issues.
Many budget hosts might also guarantee
"unlimited bandwidth," or unlimited traffic to
and from your Web site. Such claims are exaggerations
since bandwidth is a finite resource that the
budget hosting company purchases from an upstream
provider. Further, consumers must remember that
the functionality of bandwidth is limited by server
performance. If a Web server is inefficiently
provisioned and has a large number of hosted Internet
domains, that server's performance will become
slow and impeded, and will even block requests
for Web pages. If a Web server does not allow
connections due to the sheer amount of traffic
to the server, then the promise of "unlimited
bandwidth" becomes effectively meaningless.
Since budget hosts make smaller
profit margins than regular hosts, which offer
hosting in the $25 to $100 per month range, it
can be expected that technical support and customer
care functions will not be a high priority for
a typical budget host. With a budget host making
smaller margins, consumers can assume that that
most of the revenue will be retained and not spent
on support.
Most industry analysts however
peg typical support costs at 30 per cent of a
hosting company's revenue stream. Due to the smaller
margins that a budget host makes, consumers can
deduce that much less human and capital resources
will allocated to technical support. This can
become a tremendous problem, since most budget-hosting
infrastructure is usually stretched to the limit.
With a tremendous amount of server issues, due
to its bulk approach towards hosting, consumers
of such services can expect little effective support
for a budget host when a technical issue arises.
Good technical support provides
quick response and definitive solutions to any
problems that might crop up. This usually requires
a good investment in customer relationship management
and human resources, which budget hosts most usually
lack. Budget hosts therefore should never be considered
for mission-critical e-commerce, or even for an
Internet presence for a small or mid-sized business.
The best use of budget hosting service is for
a small personal site or to evaluate and learn
Internet technologies if you are a novice.