No matter what it is you are shopping for - from airline flights or iPods to real estate investments with Bernard Madoff or shares in Stanford Financial - you will doubtless encounter deals that are just "too good to be true." And, of course, they are not true at all. The same, speaking generally, can be said for "cheap web hosting with incredible features."



The reason that low- and no-cost web hosting providers can make the offers they do is that their options are severely limited and, in fact, are not at all suitable for businesses of any size. Many cheap hosts will litter your site's pages with banner ads and pop-up windows in exchange for the low cost. You may be comfortable with the intrusion, but studies have shown that your customers will consider such things a huge distraction (if not a sign of low integrity). If you "cheap out" on hosting, especially if you go the "free" route, be prepared to be a cyber billboard.

You may also be quite limited in terms of legal ownership with the freebie sites. You may get a domain, but it will generally be attached to the host's name, leaving you with a website address that is not only hard to remember but unprofessional, too. Finally, the free web hosts usually allot minimal bandwidth and disk storage, and once you begin generating more traffic and building the popularity of your site you will exceed the allotment. If you are lucky, your agreement will offer an upgrade path with a choice of services and costs, but if you do not act in a timely manner, you might incur some costly "special" charges.

More money, more features

Free web hosting has so many limitations that most savvy individuals and businesses will seek out more flexible, yet still affordable, site solutions. Moving up from "free" to "cheap" hosting can often deliver the features you need at a reasonable price. There are so many providers out there, and so much competition over terms of service, that some premium companies even maintain a few low-cost plans just to capture business (which they hope to upgrade, of course).

These days, it is not particularly hard to find a package with a decent, if not overly generous, supply of disk storage, bandwidth and flexibility. Most cheap web hosting services are geared to individuals and small or medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and provide e-mail accounts, site-building tools and even the features required for running an online storefront. Although these plans are routinely available, there is still great diversity among the offerings, and enough "scammers" out there to require a careful review of these "bargain" plans.

Don't skimp on the essentials

Low-cost web hosting confers many benefits, but it can turn out to be a disaster if you do not consider all the "mission critical" requirements of hosting. Regardless of what you are paying, your visitors (and especially customers, if you're setting up an e-commerce site) will still expect decent customer service and a certain level of technical support. This means you need to know the plan features before just forging ahead.

In addition, you should never buy any web-hosting plan, cheap or otherwise, that guarantees less than 99.9% uptime. Excessive downtime is one of the quickest ways to sabotage your web presence and devalue your online reputation. Again, knowing what to look for and checking out the fine print will allow you to set a strict budget and still end up with solid web hosting. Here are a few more things you should keep your eyes out for:

- Read the companies' terms of service (TOS) and acceptable use policies (AUP) as some hosting companies use these documents to limit your activity or curtail some of your anticipated rights.

- Low-cost plans simply cannot (honestly) offer unlimited bandwidth or storage space. Search on "web hosting scams" with your favorite search engine and read the truth about bandwidth and storage for different levels of accounts.

- Some hosts may cut back on bandwidth, storage, overall performance or other features at certain times of the day. For some hosts, offering cheaper prices means undercutting essential services. If you visit the host's site, and other websites that the company hosts, multiple times in a one-day period, you will discover if the pages and sites continue to load quickly.

- Remember that, in general, Windows hosting is more expensive than Unix (Linux) hosting.

- When hosts create low-cost plans, they will often reduce the amount of human interaction with customers to reduce management costs. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless the host skimps on information and doesn't offer good FAQ pages or an online knowledge base. If you can't get to the customer service representatives quickly, you need to get to the right information instead. If it's not available quickly and at all times, find another host.

- Simply because a hosting plan is low-cost does not mean that it is "cheap," but you have be careful, certainly. Do your research and do it well, by searching for sites and forums that rate different hosts and plans.

You can get a decent site without paying too much money, but you need to ensure that the features you need are available without extra cost, and that the company has a decent reputation. You will always have to balance features and costs, and these kinds of calculations are different for different businesses and goals. You need to be clear about what you are actually going to do with your site before you start shopping for where you will host it. First things first!