Choosing The Right Hosting Plan for Your Website
Dec 4, 2020
Choosing the appropriate hosting plan is crucial for any business owner’s website. Hosting influences the performance of a website which makes it such a big factor especially if a powerful online presence is sought by the business. Thus it is necessary to get a good host that will configure the server to ensure your site is always ready and reliable.
There are key factors you need to look out for when evaluating a hosting plan. First, let’s consider the different types of web hosting services.
The Most Popular Types of Hosting Plans
Every web hosting provider offers different web hosting services and plans. But your site’s performance depends on the capacity of the hosting plan. The hosting packages usually include:
- Shared Hosting: A shared hosting service is usually the right choice for many websites. They are the most popular because of affordability which makes it a good start-up hosting plan. Shared hosting as its name implies, can be shared with multiple users’ websites. Although known for its low-cost, there are drawbacks when this plan is chosen. If one or two websites on the shared plan start getting more traffic, the other websites on the same shared server suffer.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS): A Virtual Private Server simply means it is private and exclusive to your website. You will have unlimited bandwidth and it is actually a cheaper version of the dedicated server plan. If you are looking at a wider exposure and audience for your e-commerce site with round the clock services, VPS is recommended. The virtual private server provides better performance and security than the base-level shared services. It is best for a company website with a high amount of traffic.
- Cloud Hosting: Cloud services use software to divide multiple virtual servers and are sometimes called virtual machines. It is more complex and more flexible and you get all the benefits of shared hosting but more powerful and without the shared hosting’s performance downsides.
- Dedicated Server: Most hosting options distributes the server’s capacity to multiple users; not with a dedicated server hosting. As the name implies this plan is for single users only. The performance and power are all dedicated to one single hosting client. It provides high-quality service and can handle millions of traffic per second. So with this type of specification, a dedicated server gets more expensive than other hosting plans.
Key Factors to Consider When Evaluating a Hosting Plan for Your Business
Choosing a hosting package is not as difficult as you think, but it takes a lot of consideration. The first step is to do your research or consult with your web developer to find out what’s best for your specific needs. While sorting the hosting plan that suits you best, here are essential elements you should consider.
1. Reliability
A website’s uptime is one thing you can’t afford to miss out on. High uptime ensures your visitors can reach your websites whenever they want. Although most hosting providers’ goal is 100% uptime, all websites experience downtime. Some providers even guarantee a 100% to as low as 99% uptime threshold.
If you are to build a business website, it’s vital to know how reliable the hosting plan you want to use. You never want to miss out on that sale or the opportunity to lose some customers which can have a big impact on your business.
2. Scalability
Most hosting packages come with predetermined limited sources like Bandwidth, storage, and RAM. When your online business grows more significantly, you might need a better hosting plan to support your website.
You might never know when the traffic will increase. This is why you need a scalable and flexible hosting package to increase the hosting resources when the need arises.
A flexible hosting plan should be hassle-free to upgrade to a higher package at any time. The cost of upgrading the plan to a better one should be affordable and easy to migrate when needed.
3. Security
With all the security breaches that have been happening in almost every part of the world, security is essential and should be a top priority for your hosting plan nowadays.
Many websites today are compromised because of host vulnerability. Therefore you need to look out for providers that include monitoring services, firewalls, and other security add-ons. Hands-free WordPress updates and automatic backups are a bonus.
4. Price
What makes up the cost of a hosting plan is how the website looks on the surface and what makes it work. Creating a website and its maintenance can be expensive. Check around and compare the prices of different hosting providers. Read feedbacks and consult your web developer. In the hosting world, cheaper is not always better.
5. Support
Ensure the hosting plan comes with technical support. Nowadays, most hosting companies provide technical support to their customers, but not all provide quality support. So, always keep your eyes on the company’s reviews before you decide to choose the hosting plan.
Conclusion
Businesses require adequate server resources to deliver optimal performance to visitors. If you want reliability and powerful functionality, then a moderate amount of data transfer will be adequate at a reasonable bandwidth. Once you know what your requirement for the website is and your estimated traffic, you can decide what you need.
