How many times have you looked for cheap pricing on new domain names? These costs add up, especially if you plan on setting up a large number of sites for affiliate marketing. Many web hosting providers these days offer a free domain when you sign up, and also allow you to create unlimited sub-domains for free. This is just one way you can save money by switching to a better web hosting company. Read on for more ways to maximize your web hosting.

You want to ensure that you get web hosting that has a good server. You don’t want to have a lot of people coming to your site and start lagging because of all the traffic that you’ve been attracting to your site recently. So be sure to invest in a server that is reliable to avoid clutter problems in the future.

Select several providers you are interested in, and keep their contact information. By doing this, if potential problems become deal breakers, it’s easy for you to quickly change to a brand new host that has less interruption in the plans you have than if a host server were to completely crash.

Be sure to back up your website and information to your computer as often as you can. Your host may not back up your site so if they experience extensive technical difficulties or are even shut down for good, your site will practically be gone forever and you will have to start anew.

When you choose a web hosting company, select one that resides in the specific country of the audience you are targeting. If your target audience is Americans, stick with a hosting provider that’s located in America.

When transferring your site between hosts, have a copy of your website at both your old and new hosts for a few days. It’s important to do this because it takes 6-48 hours for the DNS to propagate. During this time, some visitors will be sent to your old website, while others whose ISPs have updated their DNS info will be sent to your new site.

Go for Linux hosting unless you need to use certain applications or server-side languages. Linux hosting has a better reputation for uptime, stability, and resource use. Shared hosting that runs on Linux tends to be somewhat cheaper, as well. There are, however, certain applications that need Windows hosting, including Plesk, Microsoft Access, Silverlight, MSSQL, and ASP.net.

If you want to run an online business, you should know that your web hosting service is going to represent your main investment. Even if this service seems costly in comparison to the other expenses related to your business, keep in mind that the success of your site will greatly depend on a good host.

There’s no question that, even though websites exist purely online with no actual stores, they still cost money to operate. Any way that you can save a bit helps, and it’s worth your time investment to shop around after reading the above tips, Compare web hosting providers and choose one that has a lot to offer you in exchange for your hard-earned money.