When you’re a newbie, and you want to create only one Wordpress blog, you don’t want to pay $20-$30/month for the hosting service. It’s ok, and as a newbie you really don’t need a VPS or a dedicated server to handle your tiny Wordpress blog, that receives like 200-300 unique visitors per day. So let’s see what are the pros and cons of low cost hosting:
The myth of huge disk space
1. Pro: You get a disk space of 100 GB, 300 GB or even 1 TB!
Con: These companies oversell their resources. If you go with the cheap hosting plans, don’t even dream about creating a porn video site and hosting 90 GB of videos. 
Tricky price tags
2. Pro: Yay, these webhosting packages cost only $6-$10/month.
Con: Well if you want to pay monthly or quarterly, than in 99% of the cases you have to pay more than $6-$10/month because only those customers get this discounted price ($6-$10/month) who choose the ‘annual payment’ option. If you want to pay only quarterly than the cost of the hosting plan can increase by $2-$3/month.
The myth of huge bandwidth…
3. Pro: Your account’s monthly bandwidth limit is 3000 GB…
Con: Again, they oversell their resources. Why? Because they’re sure that 99.9999999% of their customers won’t reach even 10% of the monthly bandwidth limit. But if you have a really successful site, a website that uses a lot of bandwidth, and CPU/RAM, they will suspend your account in no time.
Alright, before you ask yourself: If these companies lie about these three things, why should I choose any low cost hosting package?
The answer is simple: Well mate, when you get to the point that you need the power of a VPS for your site, you’ll probably make enough money to cover the costs of a VPS hosting service. Maybe you don’t believe what I say… if you don’t believe me, please take a look at my friend’s Jason Pereira’s blog. Over 350 people subscribed to his blog’s feed, his blog’s Alexa rank is at 60k, and he uses a cheap shared hosting plan at Hostican to host it.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Which hosting company hosts Jason Pereira’s blog?
March 20th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Well, Hostican hosts Jason’s and my blog too.
March 24th, 2008 at 1:57 am
I’ve had very few problems with my pretty cheap hosting package. But I also know that if it starts to cause me trouble I’ve got enough ad income to cover a reasonable upgrade.
November 13th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
I’ll stick with just starting with a Wordpress blog on a more affordable hosting service. You can always switch over later if you aren’t happy, and like you said, why pay for something you don’t need?
November 17th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Wordpress.com offers free wordpress free blog sites that unfortunately restricts you from adding adsense and other affiliate advertisements to your blog site. Except for this limitation, it is the best wordpress blog host you will find.
June 24th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
This is the first time I’ve commented here and I must say you give genuine, and quality information for bloggers! Great job.
p.s. You have an awesome template for your blog. Is it a free template or did you have it designed especially for you, I’d love to talk to your designer !?