How much? Say you have 200 websites with little content and 100 visitors a month each... Or even less than that. What is the cheapest option?
Hiya It totally depends on how much space is hosted on the websites, for example , is it 1GB ? 100MB or 50GB? That will mostly depend on what you would pay for hosting, AllHostOne offer our lowest plan , Alpha which is $1.00 p/M but only allows 1 addon domain, To be honest with you , our Sypher ($4.99) or Executive ($7.99) would be better for you as they offer unlimited addon domains only difference between the 2 are is Sypher as 25GB diskspace while Executive has 50GB).
for you I would say, you have a lot more sites so going for a VPS will be good idea, you can easily backup your sites, and so many other features and can utilize SSH feature for a lot of thing, as managing 200 sites is not easy task, you would sure need more rights in server which you can get in low cost in VPS only, you can get reseller plans also, but my recommendation would be VPS
+1 for VPS Hosting, you can get them for $20-30 bucks now and should and you won't have to worry about slowdowns with 20,000 hits a month.
If your goal is looking only for cheapest, not quality and support, than free will be the cheapest, as free and cheapest both does not has much difference, because in both you cannot expect to have good quality of support and service
Go with host gator baby started plan, they are well known for holding hundreds of site on a single package i don't think you will find any cheaper hosting then HG with quality support like email, chat etc.
Quality & full support hosting, $29,99 /year ( $2,50 / month ) 20 GB on our server. over 600 clients from all around the world.
But one thing to remember when looking for hosting is watch out for the cheapest providers. Always remember you get what you pay for.
you can host 200 small sites for free, there is 100s of free host but will better to get a small VPS, your sites will run faster and will have less problems
Cheap does not mean best. I am a host provider and offer 30 day money back guarantee and 24/7 365 day support with all of my hosting plans
Again, the same mistake you are making. Its not about the visitors, its about the scripts that you are going to be using on those sites. For example, using drupal might even crash the shared hosting [which i just solved for one of my clients]. So disk space usage and bandwidth is the last part you want to look at.
Reseller accouter will be good for you. Or else there are many hosting company which provide unlimited domain hosting with one account.