Millions of people search every month for cheap web hosting every month. I know that because I have the tools to get to know what people are searching for online. And since I build many websites for myself and my friends and clients, I have a good idea about this market.
The cheapest web hosting deal around is GoDaddy’s special offer of $12/year and it comes with a free domain name registration.
There’s a reason it is that cheap. It’s a basic hosting and this price is only for the first year. After that you’ll be paying the regular price which is $3.99/month if you pay for 2 years in advance.
When I compare it with a iPage web hosting ($2.25/month) I see more than double the price, but I get $200 of advertising coupons to spend with Facebook, Google, and bing! Now this is a good deal.
So here is how I would go around it. If I need a personal blog or a I am going to build a money making website and send traffic to it using free methods only I would take GoDaddy’s deal. The cost is less than a medium sized pizza and that’s all. I’ll think about the regular price later when I the year is over.
The opposite is true if I want to build a professional website for a client or myself, or a website that’s too commercial to optimize for search engines (no real value for the readers other than finding the product they’re searching for), in that case I’ll take iPage’s deal. $200 of free advertising could be at least doubled if I have an optimized paid-advertising campaign ready.
You’ve got the idea, reflect on your own situation. Do you need advertising? Go for iPage. You don’t need the advertising? Go for GoDaddy.