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You have probably seen the advertisements for extremely cheap website hosting. Many offer web hosting for as little as a few dollars a month. As tempting as those prices are, consider opting for better quality over cheap prices. Budget web hosts often employ shady practices designed to minimize operating cost. These practices can cause your business harm, making you look at best unprofessional and at worst unreachable. And being unreachable on the internet is tantamount to not existing. Overburdened Servers There isn't much variation in the price of server hardware, so how do budget providers manage to get their prices so low? Simple: they load each server with more sites than the server should be able to handle. Every sever can manage a certain number of connections or people accessing the content. When you have a dedicated server, all those connections go to powering your site. But when there are multiple sites on a server, you are forced to share. The number of connections per machine is largely limited by its RAM, or Random Access Memory. While there are hardware limits too, usually the RAM taps out first. The RAM is used to store information on each connection for quick access. The problem comes when one site has a traffic surge. Say there is 256 Mb of RAM on a server, and one site gets hit with traffic that takes up 200 of it. All the other sites on the server have to share the last 56 Mb. That puts a bit of a damper on a supposedly 'unlimited' plan. This isn't to say that sharing a server is bad. You just need guarantees on how much of the server you will be allotted. Gimped Servers Budget web hosts are experts of the up-sell. Of course, they are experts of the up-sell because their basic, cheap web hosting option isn’t worth signing up for. Budget hosts require you to upgrade if you want more than one domain name to point to the same server. There is no technical reason why you can't do something so basic without the upgrade, but you must pay for this feature. And usually they bury what the servers lack deep enough that you won't know there's a problem until it is too late. A good host doesn't gimp its server. It gives you all the tools you need to build your site. Limited Languages This one is really an extension of the gimped servers argument, but as a lover of the Ruby computer language, this one is especially important to me. Most budget web hosts closely control what languages you can use to build with. You are limited to a single type of database, probably MySQL, and a single language, probably PHP. If you happen to use these languages, that's not a big deal. But I prefer to code in Ruby, describe my website markup in MarkDown, or even program code in Javascript through Node.JS. With a budget host you are limited to their whims unless you pay for an upgrade. With an ethical web host, you can do what you see fit with the server you paid for. For more information about web hosting, please visit http://www.omnis.com.
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