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.
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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.
