Is there such a thing as cheap web hosting?
In most cases you will hear the age old adage, "You get what you pay for". This applies to items like, cars, electronics, clothes, even houses. It also applies more strongly to services, such things like plumbers, electricians, doctors and even web hosting companies.
Now, it amazes me that many today still think that you can buy good quality items and services at basement prices. There is a reason why the good stuff costs more. Gold is expensive, while lead is cheap. Diamonds are expensive while cubic zirconium's are cheap.
Yes you guessed it. You tend to pay for quality. While good cheap quality is rare, you do get some. Obviously the most expensive is also not necessary the best quality. But if you want the best then its going to cost a bit. Now the cost might be a little bit more to start out with, but in the long term you know it will last.
Would you go to the cheapest surgeon in town, for that back opp, or the cheapest dentist to pull that old wisdom tooth out. How many have tried the cheap route but ended up paying more because they had to get the expensive professional in. Thereby paying twice, and more.
I wonder if we ever apply the proverb "Penny wise pound foolish" to the things we buy and services we buy. This applies to website hosting as well.
Should you compare then, the cheap stuff with the expensive stuff. Well you really cannot. Should you compare a "Hyundai Atos" with a "BMW' or Even a "Corolla", can you compare Gold with Bronze. Should you compare cheap web hosting with that which is a little bit more expensive.
Many people, especially in South Africa are not aware as to what the difference is between a so called cheap web host and an expensive one. We at Integralwebsolutions do not offer the cheapest web hosting packages, we cannot compete with the R19.00pm hosting fees. Or can we? What is it that we are competing with? Are we comparing apples with apples?
I did some research, not very scientific, but it does get the point across.
I found two of the top web hosting companies in South Africa and five really cheap hosting companies in South Africa and compared them with what Integralwebsolutions offer. You will be surprised to find out, that when you compare apples with apples, we really are good value for money. In fact it could be argued that we are indeed cheap web hosts.
| Service |
Top Host 1 |
Top Host 2 |
Cheap host 1 |
Cheap host 2 |
Cheap host 3 |
Cheap host 4 |
Cheap host 5 |
| Cost pm |
R 650 |
R 545 |
R 19 |
R42 |
R 65 |
R 75 |
R 25 |
| Storage |
900mb |
1000mb |
50mb |
100mb |
50mb |
150mb |
120mb |
| Bandwidth |
1500mb |
1000mb |
300mb |
300mb |
250mb |
20000mb |
10000mb |
| Dynamic Pages |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
| Database |
Yes |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
No |
Yes |
No |
| OS |
Windows |
Windows |
Linux
|
Linux |
Windows |
Linux |
Unknown |
I Would like to draw your attention to the orange highlighted row in the table above. Because South Africa still has very expensive bandwidth, most host offer certain amount of restrictions on their site bandwidth. This means that if you have a popular site, you are / will most likely end up paying extra. The cost per MB ranges from about 7c - 25c. That might sound cheap, but for an extra 1GB of traffic you can end up paying an additional R 250
What does this mean. It means that if you have a site of 20 pages with a few images, some text, included in this is some Java script and of course css (style sheets). You could end up easily with a page of about 300k.
300k*20 = 6 MB
Not much, but this is for 1 person to browse your entire site once in one day. Lets look at something more realistic. Lets say our average page is 100k we have 20 pages. 30 days in the month
100*20*30 = 60 MB. Which means that your entire site can be browsed 30 times, or by 30 people for this amount of bandwidth. So what can we expect from a 300 MB bandwidth limit. With an average of 5 pages viewed on my site, and an average of 150k. How many visitors can I expect.
Well the answer is 20 visitors per day. This excludes you uploading anything to your site. It excludes any other documents that your clients can download, things like price lists, tutorials, brochures etc.
At Integralwebsolutions we offer unlimited site bandwidth. This means that you can have as many visitors to your site as needed. We also offer unlimited pages.
The costs in the table above do not include website design or development or the cost of changing content. This you either have to do your self, if you know HTML or ASP or PHP. If you do not, then you would have to higher a programmer or web designer to do this for you. An extra cost over and above the web hosting fee.
So now is cheap really cheap, or are we really expensive. Compare apples with apples.
Please have a look at our Budget hosting packages and our Corporate hosting packages, which include a self managed content management system. You will find that we are indeed very very cheap when you compare apples with apples.
We are cheap hosts, and we do offer cheap web hosting solutions.