Title: Affordable Web Hosting - Important tips to consider before buying

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Deciding on a web host can be a daunting task at first, but hopefully these tips will help you to find the best host to suit your requirements.

When choosing a web host you will need to find a company that has a good array of plans to suit a variety of requirements. Also you will need to find a host that allows plans to be upgraded easily with little to no downtime as your site grows and attracts more visitors. Initially when you have a new site to that you want to place online you may not know what resources the site will require, so there is little point in purchasing the best plan a host has on offer as you may be wasting hard earned money on services you may not need.

Ideally you should only pay for the plan that meets all your requirements initially, and as the requirements of your site grow you can then upgrade to higher priced plans, if you have chosen a good hosting provider this should be as simple as calling their sales department or sending an email to make the changes happen.

Personal Web Sites

Entry level hosting generally includes 100mb of storage space and up to 10GB of monthly data transfer (commonly known as bandwidth), this is usually enough for a personal web site or a small business web site. Entry level web hosting plans such as this are available for as little as $1.95 per month with no setup fees. If you have any plans in the future to host a lot of large images or video files and offer them for download, you should consider something more than what an entry level plan provides.

Other drawbacks of entry level hosting include a lack of database support, support for databases these days is essential for anything but static html sites, if you have plans of running a forum, photo gallery, shopping cart, or even a simple blog (weblog), you will need hosting that supports databases. Most often the database required is MySQL due to the large amount of open source applications that use this type of database.

Business Web Sites

For a business, a host that supports databases is normally a must have feature and as such I recommend that for a business web site you choose a plan that support this feature, the cost of this feature is not a lot more, for $3-$7 a month your host can supply support for databases and a whole lot more. Most business plans will also include more storage space, more bandwidth, and other useful features such as shopping carts.

Another feature you should consider is email, for a business, multiple email addresses are becoming the norm, you may want each employee to have an email address for example, plus a few common email addresses such as "info@", "sales@" etc., the web hosting plans from $3-$7 a month generally support 100 to several thousand email addresses which should cover your needs well into the future.

About the Author: David J. Smith writes about Dreamhost and other prominent hosts at Webhost-Advisor.com