How to Choose Perfect Shared Hosting Plan
Money saving is probably the primary concern by most people for hosting plan choice. Hosting is a matured business nowadays and many companies be able to reduce price in order to get customer purcharse. Because of this, the price range is big from different providers.
For most web hosting providers, there're multiple class hosting plans to choose from, such as starter, advance and business class etc. They come with different tech parameters and support features. How should we select even if the lowest plan seems to be working with our requirements? Following article will describe the real difference among different class plans side by side and guide you to select the most suitable plan by expert experience.
Compare Feature
When there're multiple class hosting choice (normally three), we must compare carefully about what we can get and how much to pay for extra service. Things like amount of disk storage, number of supported websites and databases etc can be seen directly. What you should evaluate is your potential needs such as if you're going to use a dedicated IP or ssl certificate or install a server side component etc.
Take SSL for example, if we purchase a 256 bit certificate seperately from ssl company, the price might be $100/yr. Plus, we will have to purchase a dedicated IP for installation. But for some cases, it's include for free with some plans at very affordable cost and hosting provider will handle installation too at zero fee!
Another concern is about the website usage, maybe you start with a small application but it grows fast because you want to make it popular. For such situation, you should not choose the very basic solution.
Hosting Server Consideration
We have been working as hosting support before in hosting company. What we found is they put different class plan accounts on different servers. I'm not saying server hardware configuration but the resource usage. For instance, normally they put 100 customer accounts on medium class plan server, but they host more than 200 accounts for basic account server. So you know the result..
You get what you pay, it's not only refering to available technical features but the actual performance and the problem rate in hosting web site. For so many sites on a single server, even a small problem might bring down all other sites.
How about the highest class plan? Well, besides some extra offer, there's no difference with medium class solution. They hosting company simply put them together as most technical features are the same. So unless you really need that much features from highest class plan, you don't have to pay the extra money at all.
Should You Upgrade?
Upgrade is a must when your current plan can not meet the website growth needs. If you just want extra server resource, probably the hosting supplier can offer it directly at exatra pay. But if you want to upgrade performance, We would suggest sign up a new account directly? Why? Because most upgrades are only to allocate more support features to hosting account and there's no change of hosting server!
For this case, if you're previously hosted at basic server environment, upgrade will not transfer your account to a new less crowd platform. Unless it's clearly stated by hosting company that upgrade means server migration, you should never do upgrade directly for better performance.
Is Hosting Service Really Cheap?
Yes, it's cheap but not so cheap. There're indeed lots of cheap hosting services with unbeatable prices, but it's the same story of "starter plan" where your account server is shared by tens and hundreds of other clients. That's the only way for hosting providers to be profitable.
Enterprise grade hardware, Bandwidth and data center services plus daily maintenance, hosting is not cheap at all. Thus if you need good performance, you must pay a reasonable price.
Pay by Use Choice – Cloud
For people who need extremely high performance server but do not use it every day, cloud hosting is perfect choice. Cloud hosting is featured for its pay by use advantage. When you don't want to use for some time, you can temperarily stop the service then re-enable it when you need to use again.
