Budget Web Hosting – What to Look For

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Budget Web Hosting – What to Look For
Design and development professionals who are looking to reduce costs in these transitional economic times have increasingly turned to budget web hosting products to help them lower monthly costs and increase profits. So how do professionals assess and purchase discount hosting products? Here are a few thoughts.

The Budget Web Hosting Landscape
When considering budget web hosting products, a buyer will generally break these products into one of several basic categories according to account type. Below are listed the traditional account breakdowns with a brief description of each.

Ad Supported or Free Hosting
This category of hosting is generally for non-business use and consists of those accounts that offer an extremely limited amount of disk space and bandwidth in exchange for displaying 3rd party advertising such as banner ads or Google AdWords. In addition to being limited in size and scope, these types of accounts can also be subject to frequent slowdowns or outages as the transitory nature of the customer base attracts potentially unsavory co-tenants on your shared server.

Discounted Shared Hosting
A cut above free hosting accounts are deeply discounted shared accounts which typically charge just a few dollars or less per month. The fact that discounted shared hosting accounts require payment strongly discourages the same types of abuses that can occur with free web hosting accounts – a definite plus. One potential pitfall is the fact that to keep the operating costs as low as possible, deeply discounted shared hosting operators may attempt to stuff as many accounts as possible onto a single server as possible. This is where getting a current customer referral or conducting proper market research becomes critical to your success.

ASP.NET Hosting
For those customers needing use Microsoft’s .NET platform, an ASP.NET hosting provider is a must. This account is pre-configured on an ASP.NET server which the hosting provider maintains. This maintenance activity includes not only the usual monitoring of server performance and uptime, but also installing the sometimes frequently needed patches from Microsoft to address software updates. An additional bit of credibility is the Microsoft Gold Certified credentials coupled with Microsoft certified engineers.

Virtual Servers or VPS Hosting
A bridge between shared server hosting accounts and dedicated servers is a virtual server – also known as VPS hosting (that’s an acronym for Virtual Private Server hosting). Virtual servers have dramatically increased in popularity along with the growth of better virtualization software. This is software that emulates a dedicated server by using a fraction of the server’s total resources to execute programs like a complete and stand-alone dedicated server. There are various virtualization platforms, but generally speaking you can get a virtual server in either a Linux OS or a .NET OS powered by Microsoft’s hypervisor. The advent of less expensive hardware and software for virtualization has created a discount virtualization hosting product that is quite viable
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