Schuetz

Can you afford to buy yourself a burger, a fries and a coke once a month?

Then you can afford to host a website on the internet.

Wait a minute. Strike that.

You can afford to host ten websites on the internet.

That's right.

Here in 2007, the business of web hosting has become so highly competitive that web hosting services are literally falling all over one another trying to offer you the most bells, whistles, options, disk space, bandwidth and tender loving care that you can possibly handle.

And personally, I'm loving it.

I remember a time when web hosting packages typically offered you something like:

• 200 MB of diskspace
• 20 GB of bandwidth (if you were lucky)
• PHP, Perl, SSI support
• 5 subdomains
• 1-5 MySQL databases

And that's about it.

For this you would have to fork out between $15-$30 per month.

Everything else was extra.

More databases cost you extra.
Shopping carts cost you extra.
SSL cost you extra.

Sometimes even support for Frontpage extensions cost you extra.

And of course --back then-- a typical web hosting package allowed you to only host one domain. If you wanted to host other domain names on the same account, well then... yup, that's right, you guessed it... it cost you extra.

Welcome to web hosting in 2007.

Now at the very least you can expect to have the following in your affordable website hosting package:

• 250 GB of hard disk space
• 2.5 TB of bandwidth (that's terabytes or 1000 gigabytes)
• Unlimited MySQL databases
• Unlimited subdomains
• Unlimited email accounts
• Python support
• Ruby on Rails support
• Installable shopping cart solutions
• Auto script installers (allowing easy setup for blogs, forums, etc)
• A variety of web statistics programs

...and, best of all, multiple domain hosting (at least 10) on the same account at no extra cost.

And all this should now cost you around $7 a month. A deal like this, of course, should come with all the usual amenites such as 99.9% uptime guarantee, 30 day money back guarantee and a gaggle of technical support options including a toll-free telephone support line and a user forum.

If the web host you are currently considering isn't offering you at least all of the above for around the same price then they just simply aren't in the game. Run like the wind and find yourself another web host. YOU CAN DO BETTER.

Nowadays, fledgling webmasters have more web hosting resources at their disposal than they could ever possibly hope to use up. And if you do max out those kinds of resources (especially the bandwidth allotment) then you are getting some major traffic to your website(s) which you can easily monetize into something that far exceeds seven dollars per month. At that point, the small cost of upgrading to a larger package will be the least of your worries.

So if you're thinking about creating yourself an online presence, now is the time. The cost of hosting a website on the internet doesn't get much better than dirt cheap.

Robert Darrell has been developing websites since 2001 and currently writes tutorials covering all aspects of web design including What is Web Hosting? and Best Free Web Hosting. His web host of choice is Lunarpages which can be accessed by this link - http://www.golunarpages.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Robert_Darrell