Why $1 shared hosting might not be a great idea for your web site

In the world of web hosting, there's mainstream providers like Wix, GoDaddy, and SquareSpace, and then there's bottom dollar shared web hosting, which ranges from free to a few bucks a year. I was intrigued by a few Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2017 deals that offered cPanel shared hosting for $1 a year. That's only $0.08 a month! How can it be possible? I'm here to tell you that it's not, at least not without significant performance and downtime issues. Also, note that these deals may no longer be available. I gave them a try and also ended up on their marketing e-mail lists for their other products (this is their upsell game). You could wait until the next Black Friday event, or sign up earlier if you need a plan sooner.

Let's look at some uptime graphs I captured using StatusCake, which I highly recommend (I'm not affiliated with them, just a satisfied user).

Here are the providers I compared, along with their price points. I'm not including some particulars, like amount of disk space or bandwidth. The specs should be more than enough for anyone considering shared hosting, which should only be used for personal sites or perhaps even very small business sites. FTC disclosure: the following list includes affiliate links, which means this site may receive commission when you make a purchase through one of the providers.

• AlphaRacks (New Years 2018 $1/year plan, still valid as of Feb 2018)
• WootHosting (Black Friday $1/year plan, still valid as of Feb 2018)
• TurnKey Internet web hosting ($2.49/mo with pre-pay)
• HostPC DirectAdmin hosting ($4.95/mo with pre-pay)
• Impact Shared hosting (Black Friday plan, $2.50/year)

The winner in terms of pure uptime would be Impact Shared. However, the load time is a bit slow at 1 sec for a test page that is essentially just says "Hello world!". That may have been just from a few slow measurements that brought the average time up, but it is worth noting. As you can see, you can definitely get a reasonable amount of uptime and page load performance with Turnkey Internet and HostPC (whose parent company is actually Turnkey Internet). Overall I would say the winner is Turnkey Internet. You get what you pay for.

So are these $1 hosting plans good for anything? I say yes - they might be worthwhile for learning cPanel as an end user, or for learning web development (though you can really do this from your own local machine). But I would not depend on them for any important web hosting needs.