Web Hosting is usually a pre-pay business. You pay for your web hosting in advance and then next month you get charged again and so on. Over the years this has worked out great. Then quite a few web hosts started offering pre-pay terms of up to 3 years. Pay once and then pay again in a year or so – in return for your trust you receive a huge discount on the price for web hosting. Not a bad deal, eh?!
There are a few things to consider though. For one, it is important to be careful who you trust with your money. You do not want to have prepaid for 2 years and then your web host disappears after 7 months. So, when signing up and pre-paying for web hosting it is important to see who you are working with. If a company is around for many years and has a certain reputation and market share, pre-paying for longer terms is usually safe. If a company is small and new and not well established, then do not pre-pay for more than 1 quarter in advance.
Why not to pre-pay for the long term with certain hosts? If the host disappears your money is gone, too. Once a credit card payment is older than 60 days your chances of getting a chargeback approved are very slim. Again, this is usually only an issue with smaller, newer, and not well established web hosts.
So, which web hosts can you trust in my opinion? I have worked with many web hosts over the years. I have been watching the web hosting industry and the following 3 names definitely stick out for me. My recommendations are in order of how much I like or prefer each company. The #3 host on this is also the youngest company on this list (founded in 2008), but has a) reached quite some volume and b) has established a solid brand reputation.
#1 HostGator
#2 IX Web Hosting
#3 JustHost
These 3 web hosts offer very low prices when pre-paying web hosting for up to 3 years. You can read my reviews about these 3 web hosts here.
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