When you’re looking at web hosting options to launch your first website, there are a lot of different options and a few different things to compare before you commit to a hosting provider.
Whether you are running a personal family blog or getting started in the exciting world of online business, it’s possible to find a hosting service that fits your expectations all for an affordable price. In this article, we’re going to go through a few points including the different types of hosting services and how they compare to each other.
Server Hosting Types Explained
One of the first decisions that you have to make when looking for hosting is the type of plan. One option is Dedicated Hosting. This plan allows you to have the entire server to yourself. You don’t have to share any resources or bandwidth with any other websites. Dedicated Hosting isn’t the most affordable hosting plan and runs at the higher end of the price scale. Most dedicated servers will cost anywhere from $100 to $1000 a month depending on the type of processor being used.
One step down from a dedicated server is Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting. This type of hosting plan has multiple websites on the same server. However, the server is partitioned off so each customer gets their own dedicated section of the server with their own resources. This will can cost anywhere from $19 to $90 a month.
The next step down from VPS Hosting is WordPress Hosting. This is the recommended plan for websites running WordPress. This hosting plan is optimized specifically for WordPress and brings incredible speed and performance. There are multiple websites usually on WordPress Hosting, but as it’s dedicated to the WordPress content management system (CMS), this helps prevent any configuration issues. The cost of WordPress Hosting starts as low as $8 and up to $120 a month.
The final type of hosting is Shared Hosting. Being the most common type of hosting, Shared Hosting is exactly as it sounds, your website is hosted on a server with dozens of other websites. Depending on the size of your website, this can be a perfect option to get started. This will be the cheapest option going as low as $5 to $20 a month.
How Do They Compare?
When it comes to comparisons, there are several different aspects to consider, all mainly dictated by the performance you need for your website.
If you have a popular website getting hundreds of visits daily, then it’d be wise to consider a high-class WordPress Hosting plan or possibly even a VPS Hosting plan. These plans can offer unlimited bandwidth and processing power.
Some Shared Hosting servers are advertising with unlimited bandwidth. While this might sound great, the processing speeds are often much slower, meaning that your website operates slowly. If you are just starting out and don’t have a large website, Shared Hosting can provide the necessary power needed to launch your home on the web. Below, we’ve included a short checklist to use before signing a hosting contract:
- How many email accounts are offered? (Some hosting providers provide unlimited accounts)
- What backup features are offered? (Unfortunately, many of the cheaper options don’t offer any).
- What control panels and software packages are offered? (We recommend cPanel as a control panel)
- Do they offer free SSL certificates? (Some hosting providers don’t and this will cost you around $80 per year)
Once you weigh all of these options, you can easily choose which one is best for you.
If you are just getting started with launching a WordPress website, WordPress Hosting can handle all of your of your needs. If you are launching a website that is not using WordPress, Shared Hosting should be able to bring enough power and performance. It is only when you grow your site traffic or your business that you may need to upgrade to a VPS or Dedicated server.
