Let’s be honest, web hosting isn’t one of those things which costs the earth, far from it. You can pick up shared hosting accounts for peanuts these days due to the infrastructures the major web hosts have in place – but like with all things in life, you do truly get what you pay for and sometimes, the cheapest option isn’t always the best one. Throughout this article we’re going to go over a few things to consider to make sure when taking out a web hosting plan, you really are getting what you pay for and equally that you’re not overpaying for resources you never and will never use. They say money doesn’t grow on trees, so why waste it if you don’t have to. If you’re like me, you work hard for your money so why use it to line someone elses pockets!
So let’s get started. The key thing to remember when it comes to choosing a web hosting package is that you should only be taking out a plan that suits your current site and proposed targets (from a traffic and development perspective). By this I mean, don’t get lured in by the borderline propaganda web hosts put out offering you double the resources of “package 1” for less than a quarter of the price extra – in truth, this seems great but in reality, you probably won’t come close to using the resources of “package 1” regardless! You need to work out what your site needs to function (software), work out how much bandwidth (transfer) it will use money to money and also how intensive in terms of server resources it is going to be. Once you have this information, you can begin to find a package to suit you.
The Packages
All web hosting companies at the time of writing seem to offer the same sort of thing. Sure, they’re dressed up and given fancy package names but you’re ultimately either buying shared hosting, reseller hosting, a dedicated server or some new fangled VPS/Cloud solution. All of these are great and all will do the job of serving your website effectively but the price points are massively different. You could pick up a shared hosting account for $1 a month – or you could add three-zero’s to that figure and take out a dedicated server – that plus everything in between. So it pays to know what you want before you get lured in with some great sales tactics. Work out what your site needs, choose a solution to match – nothing more nothing less.
Small Companies Over The Major Players
Usually, in life, if we want something cheaper we go to a superstore where the sheer volume of products and sales drives the price down which is passed back onto us, the consumer. But, in web hosting, this is simple not the case. The truth is, big companies, small companies and even bedroom operations can serve your site equally well but the pricing is sporadic at best. You can find small companies charging more than big companies and vice versa. The saying that something is worth what someone is willing to pay is particularly true in the world of web hosting!
My preference is to find something cheap enough that meets my requirements and then compare the web hosting companies offering those price points. If it were a toss up between hosting with one of the major players or a smaller company then I’d choose the smaller company every day of the week. You may think you’ll get better support or better reliability with a big firm but it’s simply not true. Big firms mean lots of customers and lots of customers can often lead to bad performance. The same goes for support time. You could be waiting days for a third party support tech who has been sourced on the other side of the world to manage your affairs. To the big firms, you’re just another number unfortunately. With smaller firms, the opposite is true. They care about each and every one of their customers, they have more resources at their disposal and you won’t be waiting more than a couple of hours for your issue to be resolved!
So that’s that, hopefully this article has given you food for thought when it comes to web hosting. In short, ignore the bells and whistles. Find a package that suits you and find a firm who will give you their time and attention to support you.