There are hundreds, if not thousands hosting providers globally? How can you know where to order hosting? And, which is more important, how much should it cost? If you’re going to launch a website for your business, there are many aspects you should weight. You may be wondering which provider and which hosting option to prefer but after doing a detailed research on the market all your doubts will be solved. If you need help to figure out the optimal cost of a hosting package you need, this guideline is for you. Let’s find out how much does web hosting cost.
Free Hosting: Is payoff worth the trouble?
“Free hosting” sounds very enticing, but the bitter truth is that the quality of service you get leaves a lot to be desired. Say, your clients try to access your website, but they simply cannot find it. How will you solve this problem? The first thing most of us would do is to contact the support service. However, free service providers tend to have very weak customer service, Whenever there’s an issue with your website, you need to make sure you partner with a company that provides brilliant care of the customers, and you can reach the assistants when you really need them. You have to make sure that your issues will be solved in a timely manner. “Email us and get the reply within 48 hours” is NOT acceptable. Imagine how much revenue and client you can lose for several days while trying to resolve website issues? When your project is down, you should feel 100% confident in your provider.
Another serious problem with free web-hosting providers is advertisements. In most cases, the absence of payments comes at the cost of endless ads put on your pages. “I don’t care,” – you may say, but people do. Yes, major websites like Facebook and YouTube use ads and people still visit them. However, there’s a huge difference between selling space to support you well-established project (by the way, Facebook and others approve of ads before placing them) and having your brand-new pages cluttered with ads you have no control over. Even worse, the ads may have nothing in common with your business sphere, and be objectionable, or be published by your direct rivals! That looks unprofessional and can damage both your brand image and conversions. Order hosting and don’t hurt your website by others’ advertisements.
But How Much Should Hosting Cost?
The price of hosting varies considerably from $2/month to several hundred bucks a month. What’s your optimal budget? If you own a small business, or you’re an online entrepreneur, you can afford a simple shared hosting solution for some $4-8 per month. Of course, a $4 package may offer fewer features than an $8 package.
Which Features Do I Need?
When selecting a hosting package, bandwidth and storage space are your primary considerations. The amount of resource depends on what kind of website you launch. If this will be a typical 100-page or smaller website, you don’t need much of them.
Bandwidth is the amount of traffic (visitors) your website handles. In layman’s terms, bandwidth is the amount of data measured in Gb or Tb that your website transfers from the hosting provider to the users during the payment period (as a rule, 1 month). 1 Gb is about 1 bln of data bytes. In the beginning, a couple of gigabytes will be enough, but you will need space for growth. Do you know what your website will be like in 6 months or a year? Although unlimited bandwidth may seem too much for the start, this is a cool choice, if you plan to develop and grow your website. Some providers offer unlimited bandwidth for as low as $5 per month! If your bandwidth is limited, contact the company and ask assistants to define the optimal amount of it according to the number of daily or weekly visitors. Again, take into consideration the potential growth – it’s even more important that the present analytics.
When it comes to storage and disk space, you should consider the type of your website. Static HTML pages will require less space than pages with huge photo galleries, audio and video files, or databases. Static pages can be easily hosted on a 10 Gb package, which is already boatloads of space but is among the cheapest offers. A media-rich website would run well with at least 150 Gb disk space.
Now consider what kind of project do you have exactly? If your project runs on a Content Management System (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, you will need 1 MySQL database for each hosted website. MySQL is a database system that helps to integrate your content to your CMS. Ask what kind of CMS your website uses before choosing a hosting solution.
Security is one more crucial aspect. SSL certificates are a must for eCommerce stores and websites that process and store users’ sensitive information. That also concerns websites with databases containing users’ phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account info, and so on. SSL can be purchased for about $30-50 a year. Some paid hosting service already have SSL included for free.
The Bottom Line
So, what’s the average price of hosting? For most businesses, $5-7 per month is an optimal solution. But the bigger your project is, the more resources it requires, so paying a higher sum is completely justified. Free and $2/month solutions can appeal to you, but you get what you pay for. Waiting an eternity for customer support replies and seeing frustrating ads can affect your business.
But if you plan to host a website without much media and with a limited amount of pages, a $3 package can be the way to go. Don’t rush to order expensive hosting solutions unless you develop your website normally, or plan to host tens or hundreds of websites with multiple user accounts.
comments