Hosting costs

[glynnbed]

I recently had a website built for me that I hope was very cheap, I sure it was. I am very happy with the site but they also have an offer of 2G hosting for $20 every year, reduced to $20 because they built the site.
Am completely lost with regard to hosting, I have a retail site with about 500 products. I understand and don't believe there is such a thing as unlimited hosting.

I want to know if this is cheap enough and big enough for what I need?

 

[Markbnj]

Hard to say whether it's big enough because we know nothing about your site or expected traffic. I pay $12.95/mo. for linux hosting for my Wordpress blog and other stuff I do, if that helps.

 

[DaveSimmons]

One thing that might matter is who registers the domain name. You want to make sure that you register the domain name yourself, so that you control it and you can move to a new hosting company later if you need to.

 

[Red Squirrel]

With hosting it's best to start small, then as you need more resources upgrade. No point paying for more resources if you don't need them... though it is nice to have room to grow. But for the first site you're just testing the waters so I'd go ahead. At 20/mo chances are those resources are oversold, but if you don't get lot of traffic at first it may be ok. When things start to slow down then look at a better host.

 

[xanis]

With hosting it's best to start small, then as you need more resources upgrade. No point paying for more resources if you don't need them... though it is nice to have room to grow. But for the first site you're just testing the waters so I'd go ahead. At 20/mo chances are those resources are oversold, but if you don't get lot of traffic at first it may be ok. When things start to slow down then look at a better host.

I'll second this. If you're just starting out, chances are that $20/month hosting will be fine, at least for the first year. For that price I'd be skeptical of the quality (it's definitely shared hosting) but again, it's probably fine for the time being. Later on you can look into something a little beefier.

Amazon EC2 is worth looking at for scalability. It's most definitely overkill for what the OP is running, but it's a pretty cool service, and there is a free usage tier if you want to play around with it. My company has been using it more recently to deploy apps for some of the more "budget-conscious" clients.