Budget Web Hosting part # 1

Listed on this page are cheap web hosts (commercial web hosts, of course) and brief reviews of the hosts. Note: only where I have information pertaining to the host will there be a review. What constitutes a "budget web host" for the purpose of this page? Essentially I just use common sense (my definition of it!), looking at the price of the package and its features. A package which costs $20 or under per month might make it here. On the other hand, a package that costs more (eg $30) but providing additional features (eg an exceptional amount of data transfer or free web design) might also make it here. Most of these web hosts have more than one package available. To keep each description from being overly-long, I often only list their cheapest package on this page. You can click the link to find out more about the other packages if that host interests you.

I strongly recommend that you read the article How to Choose a Web Host before committing yourself to any web host. You can also find my personal favourites (with a more detailed review of those hosts) in my FAQ: Which Web Host Do You Recommend?.

If your site is resource intensive, that is requiring a lot of memory or CPU time, you may be interested in the Virtual Private Servers (VPS) Web Hosting and the Web Hosting: Dedicated Servers pages instead. Those plans allocate more resources to your website, allowing you to do things you would not normally be permitted in a shared web hosting environment. You can read more about this in the article The Fine Print in Web Hosting: Resource Usage Limits.

Warning: take all claims of "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth in the web host's packages with a pinch of salt. If you're not sure why, read the article The Myth of "Unlimited" in Web Hosting and investigate the host's Terms of Service carefully. In addition, the prices and features listed here were correct at the time I checked it. However, the web hosting industry is very competitive, and thus the hosts tend to change their prices and package features very frequently (with emphasis on the "very"), so much so that the current prices and package details will probably be different by the time you read this. Your best bet is to check the host's site for the authoritative information.

GoDaddy Web Hosting 

This well-known domain registrar also provides web hosting plans, with its cheapest plan starting at $2.99 per month (paid 3-monthly). The Linux package provides 100 GB of disk space, unlimited data transfer, 100 email addresses (total 100 MB storage), 10 databases (each with 200 MB of storage), preinstalled scripts (blogs,shopping carts, CMS, image galleries), etc. Payment methods include both credit cards and PayPal.

1&1 Internet Web Hosting 

This web host is one of the biggest web hosts around. They offer both Linux and Microsoft Windows packages (see Should You Choose a Linux or a Windows Web Hosting Package? if you don't know which to choose) as well as Dedicated Linux Servers. Their $5.99/month (paid annually) Linux package includes 1 free domain name, unlimited web space, unlimited data transfer, hosting for additional websites (500 subdomains, unlimited number of domains), a site builder (meant for beginners who want to build sites quickly from a set of templates), 500 email accounts (2 GB mailbox space), email forwarding, autoresponders, email forwarding, 25 MySQL databases (1 GB), PHP, DNS management, FTP, a control panel, etc. They accept both credit card and PayPal payments.