How To Choose & Buy Website Hosting?
Only several things really matter when you choose web hosting that meets all your requirements:
- size of your project
- goals you want to achieve
- money your are going to spend
Defining all these three things it will be much easier to make the right choice. You need to answer the following questions. Do you want to create a small static website with several pages about your product or you intend to create a blog with ads and tips for your potential customers? Do you have enough experience or professional staff to create complex web site when knowing programming languages is a must? Is eCommenrce site with shopping cards is your aim? Create the list of your expectations and aims before starting to read the following info. You need to know what your final aim is before looking for the best ways to achieve it.
Top 5 Crucial Tips Before Buying Web Hosting
Notwithstanding your aim and size of your project you may know nothing or not enough about web site creation. Of course, you can hire a professional, but if you want to create a website on your own you need to choose web hosting plans that support most blog platforms. It can be Joomla, WordPress, Blogspot, b2evolution or Drupal.
For beginners WordPress will be enough. This content management system (CMS) provides you with all the necessary plugins, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools as well as useful tutorials to help you in developing and managing your website. With easy-to-use control panel and all the information provided in understandable way, WordPress remains to be one of the most popular CMS today.
Look for Cpanel control panel when choosing web hosting plan. Cpanel is the users’ best choice among a wide range of control panels offered by various hosts. This control panel allows you to manage your web site or multiple web sites, MySQL databases, email or FTP accounts within several clicks. It is fast and simple to use.
Web Site of Your Dreams – Size Matters?
Talking about the size of your web site, you should pay attention to such options as disk space, bandwidth, number of MySQL databases. All these features influence the size of the website you can host. You also can look for the number of websites allowed to host within one account if you want to create several domains. Sometimes you are allowed to host only 1 website, sometimes this figure can increase up to 5 domains. There are also web hosting plans that offer you to host unlimited websites within 1 hosting account.
If you want to create a small static website just availability of MySQL databases will be enough. If you want to create something breathtaking that needs a lot of information to store you can look for hosting plans that offer you up to 100 MySQL databases. Some users suppose that unlimited MySQL databases are useless even for large web sites. However, most web hosting plans with advanced features offer you only this option. So, why to refuse?
Define Who Your Site Visitors Are
Geographical location of your web host also influences your successful project. You should choose web hosting depending on the countries your potential customers are from. It will influence your SEO rankings as well as provide more specific tools available in some regions only, making your website more convenient and useful for your visitors.
Thus, if you are going to attract German visitors you need to choose German hosting. Those who want to provide their service for UK visitors should choose UK hosting. If your aim is to become well-known among French speaking users who live in Canada you need to choose web host located in Canada. Thus, you have more chances for your web site to appear on the first page of SEO rankings.
For English speaking customers you can choose USA hosting. Such type of hosting is considered to be cheaper, but sometimes it is not the best choice. For cheaper prices you can forget about high quality service. Anyway, there are also exceptions to this rule.
Bandwidth and Disk Space – Unlimited Only?
If you have intention to create a great website with plenty of pages, videos, music files or images, to choose unlimited hosting can be the best choice. Such hosting plans offer you unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space as well as unlimited MySQL databases and unlimited web domains. Of course, such features may be superfluous, but in this case you won’t count and worry about some limitations. Such plans seem to be ideal.
There are web hosting companies that offer you such unlimited web hosting plans starting with the cheapest beginners plans. However, if you need to choose among the hosting plans with limited and specified options, the following tips help you to decide. As you have already understood the limited plans will be appropriate for small sites to begin your project. In this case 2 GB bandwidth per month would be enough. The disk space that allows you to create a decent website is 50GB. You can choose the web hosting plan with such features without doubts if you want to begin a small or middle-sized project.
Shared vs. VPS vs. Dedicated Hosting
Shared, VPS and dedicated hosting can be divided accordingly to the size of your project and your increasing needs. Thus, if a small web site with several pages is your aim – shared hosting will be enough. For more sophisticated web sites you will need to choose VPS or dedicated hosting. Some people suppose that VPS hosting is just the cheaper version of dedicated hosting. However, there are some differences you should consider. Here are the basic features that differ these web hosting plans except the pricing.
- 1. Shared Hosting
- one server to host your site with other several web sites
- limitations in memory usage
- limitation in CPU Load
- don’t have access to server configuration
- can be affected by other sites malicious software or policy
- 2. VPS Hosting
- a server is separated to allow each partition to act as virtual dedicated server
- more flexible and independent than shared hosting
- a fixed amount of server resources
- has its own disk space, bandwidth
- can be individually rebooted
- IP address for extra fee
- 3. Dedicated Hosting
- you have your own dedicated server
- unlimited options
- can manage a website on your own setting configurations, cron jobs, etc.
- dedicated IP
- more secure type of hosting when other sites can’t influence your project
Thus, choosing shared hosting can be the simplest decision. You don’t need to make any calculations because as a rule, web hosting providers offer you all the necessary options to run your small project smoothly. The other thing is with more complex websites. As you can see the difference between VPS and dedicated hosting is not only the price, but also the limitation of server resources you should consider. For example, VPS hosting plan can offer you 58% CPU, 258 Mb RAM, etc. In other words, your site will be hosted with other websites on the same local server but virtually you will have the options of dedicated server.
However, to create more advanced sites when you want to set configuration, run cron jobs, to perform proper monitoring or to be sure in secure email marketing campaign, the dedicated web hosting can be the best solution.
Web Hosting Pricing: Cheap or Very Cheap?
Most web hosting companies offer you to pay per month, per 6 month, per year or per several years as well. Per year seems to be the best option to choose. The pricing is quite adequate in this case and allows you to switch to another web host or upgrade your web hosting plan without problems.
Of course, we all are looking for the cheapest offers, but almost all of them are not appropriate for any decent projects. The web hosting pricing of most companies can be presented in the following average data:
$1.95 per month x12 = $23
$4.45 per month x 12= $54
$7 per month x 12 = $84
$10 per month x 12 = $120
As you can see there are really very cheap hosting plans and quite affordable plans. If your aim is to create a web site for your friends and family to share your emotions and photos, the cheapest options will be enough. In this case downtime or overloaded servers won’t be a big problem for such a price.
However, if you want to create a website to earn profits, make orders and communicate with your customers, it is better to choose more expensive offer. You can pay twice bigger, but it will pay you back in the future.
If you want to create a small website, so called satellite for back links with static web pages, choose the cheapest plan without hesitation. The downtime won’t influence your project. All you need is to set auto backup. If your satellite becomes something bigger and more important, you always can upgrade to more sophisticated web hosting plan.