Cutting costs
“A penny saved is a penny earned.” Ben Franklin said it first.
It’s probably better to save a penny than spend it and earn it back later because the earned penny will be taxed a second time. I’m not talking about being miserly or cheap, but wisely frugal.
When you are working online it’s important to reexamine your expenses periodically.
It’s easy to hemorrhage money on hosting. Most of my clients grossly overestimate the amount of space and bandwidth that their sites will require, and then they pay for their optimism month after month.
Server space can actually be quite cheap. Use Google, it’s our friend. For hosting multiple sites use search terms like “discount reseller hosting”, you’ll find hundreds of nice hosts that will offer WHM with cPanel– this is what most of us need. Make sure to check the reputation of the host and double check to make sure that what they offer is what you need. If you aren’t sure, check the documentation provided by your current host and the support forums for any platforms and plugins you want to use.
I highly recommend the host that I use, Atomic Webhosting. The support is personable, responses are quick and the hosting is extremely reliable all at an extremely good price. I think I’m in love.
Then there’s the matter of domain names. I know GoDaddy is annoying with all the offers upon checkout– but they are cheap, take customer service seriously and have a kickin’ domain name control panel.
Some registrars (Yahoo) will offer a cheap initial year, and then kick up the price the next year. And other registrars (Yahoo) will also require that you email your requests for a DNS change and make you wait for weeks before actually getting around to reflecting the change. Some registrars (Yahoo) really tick me off when all I want to do is a bit of quick redirection so that I can work on a site without really mucking things up.
One last point: Use free services, Google Apps Standard Edition offers free custom gmail (you@yoursite.com) , Google sites, Google docs and Google Calendar. All free, all easy to use, but that’s just one example– keep looking and you’ll keep finding free (or ridiculously inexpensive) alternatives to the paid services you need.