The number of websites hosted in the Philippines increases significantly almost everyday due to the current trend that, it is now becoming a requirement of any industry or companies to give them more exposure to the public, which is also their potential costumers. Moreover, online businesses are now increasing in number like online shopping and marketing. Some people also plan to own a website just a hobby or just a means of expressing their self like blogs. One other reason why their are other people who plan to acquire a website as a hobby is that nowadays, everyone can find web hosting services that is very cheap compare to others. If you are planning to acquire a website either for business purposes or as a hobby, the following are some helpful tips before purchasing web hosting services,1. Domain registration and web hosting. You may be deceive by some web hosting companies in the advertisement of their services. Usually, if they are giving the rates in monthly basis, it does not include the price of the domain so you may think it is cheap. For everyone’s information, a complete package in website hosting includes domain registration and web hosting. Domain registration is a process by which your domain ,e.g., mydomain.com, will be registered for one to two years, depending on the domain registration companies, and cost around P600 to P1500 per year for gTLD domains like .com, .org and .net. ccTLD domains like .ph, .com.ph and .org.ph has a cost of around 3 times of the dTLD domains. On the other hand, web hosting is just where you upload your files like HTML files. It’ s price also varies from as low as P30 to P3000 depending on the web hosting company. Domain registration and web hosting can be purchase as a package or separately. For example, you can purchase domain hosting package only if your already have an existing domain. You just need to point the name server of your domain to the name server of the web hosting company. You have the option which package to purchase but I strongly suggest to purchase them separately to avoid any possible problem with either of your hosting service providers in the future.

2. Quality and reliability does not always proportional to the cost of web hosting. Though the website hosting in the Philippines is relatively cheaper than the web hosting services abroad, there are still some very cheap web hosting package that you can find in the Philippines. And most of the time, the cost does not affect the quality of their services. The only reason why there are web hosting companies that offer a higher cost of web hosting is that they are not based in the Philippines and their price must always be in line with their prices abroad. I myself have a website (this website) which I bought 7 months ago for only P2,560 per year, and just second from the cheapest, but its performance in terms of uptime, speed, and quality of service is comparable, and most of the time, better, than others. P2,560 includes P600 for 1 year domain registration, P150 for monthly web hosting fee and the rest are for taxes. As a basis of comparison, I had also administered a website before with 50MB disk storage and hosted by a US based company and billed us by almost P1120 monthly, excluding domain registration, but the quality of hosting in terms of speed and uptime is really down below compare to what I had mentioned earlier.

When planning to purchase a website, try also comparing each company` s web hosting packages. Aside from the price of web hosting, the other factors that are also considered in selecting the right web host are, bandwidth, disk space, the scripting language and database that it supported and how many accounts may be allotted for each client, and server specifications. The choice of package will basically depend on the type of website that you are planning to make, whether it is computationally or storage extensive.

To compare the market share and credibility of some web hosting companies in the Philippines, try visiting this website, webhosting.info/webhosts/tophosts/Country/PH.