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I’ve been burned by "low cost/cheap hosting" before, so the first thing to state is that  to select the right provider is tricky and might require several iterations.  Different sites have different demands and what will work for one will not work for another. Also qualification of webmasters doffer. Some are accomplished Unix administrators, some are professional programmers and some are just HTML writers. As for low price, you need to see the whole price range and remember that free cheese is usually a sign of a mousetrap.

The most common practice among We hosting providers is overselling. The latter is defined in Wikipedia as

'Overselling or Overbooking refers to the selling of a volatile good or service in excess of actual capacity. Overselling is a common practice in the travel and lodging industry. In telecommunications, sometimes the term oversubscription is preferred. The practice occurs as an intentional business strategy where sellers expect that some buyers will not consume all of the resources they are entitled to, or that some buyers will cancel, the practice of overselling ensures that 100% of available supply will be used resulting in the maximum return on investment.

Cutthroat competition led to misleading advertisements and "race to the bottom" in prices so you need to be very careful selecting provider and monthly price should not be the only or primary factor. For example if you store content in databases then CPU limits will hit you first, before bandwidth limits.  Headaches in case you went to a wrong provider cost much more then $24-$48 per year you can save by going from $7-8 per month provider to $5 per month provider.  It is easy to get into this "cheapest" trap by $24 difference is just the cost of on lunch or so. Real cost for you due to troubles with provider, in case you have site with substantial traffic, can be in hundreds, if not thousand dollars in your time and lost revenue.  If, for example, you have substantial AdSense revenue then it might be prudent to select "business" hosting (which costs $12-$20 per month as traffic on low cost plans can be "shaped". In any case you should not believe advertised specs for the account, if only for the reason outlined in Bandwidth Mathematics.

The best value is usually in the middle price range, not on lower of high end. There are three major classes of cheap hosting:


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[Mar 02, 2012] Virtual Dedicated Servers - Highly Configurable Plans Low Prices

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[Mar 02, 2012] Linode - Xen VPS Hosting

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The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is a non-profit organization that gathers and reports information on business reliability. According to the BBB website, Dot5 Hosting has a rating of F.

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FreeBSD based provider; $3.88 plans

PowWeb, Inc. is a privately owned, debt-free company that got started in the Web hosting business in 1999 geared towards helping individuals and business establish a basic presence on the internet all with one flexible plan.

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Overselling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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http://www.siteuptime.com