Educational Grants

For many small businesses, web hosting is like any other expense - everyone wants to keep it to a minimum. While there are some great deals to be had, you should be sure that a web hosting provider is not cutting corners in order to offer extremely low pricing. If the deal seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Here are some things to watch out for:

1) Overloading servers to cut cost. This is one of the most common practices of "bargain" web hosts, and simply means that rather than evenly spread sites and resources over multiple servers, they cram all of their customers on one server. This keeps their cost down and margins up. Unfortunately, it an lead to problems for site owners, including:

• IP blacklisting. If your site shares the same server with spammers, phishing sites, or bulk emailers, it also shares the same "IP address". This is simply a unique address used for communication throughout the Internet.
  
  Many ISPs and email providers will block mail and web traffic from IPs they determine to be associated with spam networks. If someone on your server is not behaving, there is a possibility that your legitimate email will not be delivered because the recipient's email service may block all mail from the IP you share with the offending parties. While there is no way to absolutely avoid this, your chances of being blacklisted are greater if you are using an unethical host that allows far too many sites on one server.
• Poor performance. If your host is allowing far too many sites on one server, overall performance can be drastically affected. This can lead to timeouts or slow response when visitors use your site - certainly not desirable for any small business.

One easy way to see how many other sites share your server (or, at the very least, your IP address) is to use a free service such as MyIPNeighbors.

The bottom line? Cheap web hosting is great - just make sure the service doesn't match the price, because it will cost you in the long term.

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