Don't Shoot Yourself In The Foot With Bad Web Hosting

Web hosting doesn't have to be hard. Honestly, from an online entrepreneur's perpective (even if you're a student), you shouldn't touch shared hosting with a ten foot pole if you're serious about your business. Why would you sacrifice control, flexibility, reliability and support just to save a few bucks? That cons outweigh the 1-time high you get from paying $4/month or whatever for hosting. Whatever money you're going to invest, invest it right. Hosting your business on shared hosting, in my opinion, is like buying the cheapest home theater and thinking it will be good just because it has plenty of speakers.

What Kind Of Hosting Is Best For My Business Then?

The best way to go for most businesses right now is VPS hosting, but be careful where you go.

You know how the 'cloud' is supposed to be super reliable? Many hosting companies market their cloud hosting as if cloud = zero-downtime. I fell victim to that when I became a customer of VPS.net. My single VPS's that I bought from them had no problems, but the SANs (storage area network) for each of their clouds failed multiple times a month. That means iPage™ Training, my website training project I worked really hard to make for website newbies (yes, people who insist on buying shared hosting), was obliterated due to their stupid software corrupting all clients' storage and files. Good thing I keep a lot of backups.

So where should I get VPS Hosting?

For the majority of my projects I've used Steadfast.net for over 6 years now. I really love their support and their dedicated servers AND their cloud vps hosting has been flawless for me. Their OnApp system is really easy to use - you can just hit a button and add a new VPS, or easily login to a current vps to manage/add new sites, etc... The power a VPS puts in your hands is limitless, and it's way cheaper than a dedicated server - and usually faster these days. You can even use the CPU slider to make it as fast as you want. And I only pay for what I use so I'm not wasting money... My hosting scales with my needs, but even starting out at the lowest levels is better than using "cheap web hosting" most people search for.

Just save yourself the headache, heartache and years of your life... do it right. Don't make the same mistakes I did when I was starting out online.

Ian Mason
WebHostingBreak