How much to spend on your website hosting

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If you are new to making websites you probably just recently learned that in order to get your web page online, you need a hosting service to serve the web pages to your sites visitors. In this article, I am going to go over how much you should spend for your websites’ hosting plan. The success of your web site could very well depend on which hosting provider you go with.

Price range - $0

There are many free web hosting providers out there. They aren’t hard to find. All you need to do is search “free web hosting” on google and you will get millions of results. Usually the only catch is that you have to display some form of advertisement on your web site. Some adverts are small….some are big…and some might not put any on your site at all. A free web hosting service is great if you are new to web design and websites or if you have a small web site that receives little traffic.

Price range - $1.00-$15.00/m

The majority of users will be fine with a web hosting service in this price range. A lot of services will try and blind you with a lot of numbers and stats for their web hosting plans - for instance 100GB of Disk Space and 100TB of data transfer. Don’t be fooled by this. I’ve been in the web hosting business for about 7 years and I would say that 95% of my clients use no more than 1GB of disk space and 10GB of monthly transfer. If a host is charging $3.00/m for 100GB of disk space and 100TB of transfer, the chances are this hosting provider isnt the best one out there just because they offer the most stuff. They are heavily overselling in order to put this offer out there. This means your server could be heavily overloaded or might be unreliable. If a host is offering 1GB of disk space and 50GB of transfer for $9.00/m the chances are they are going to be better as far as support, reliability, and server speed is concerned. In summary, bigger plan stat numbers DOES NOT mean better hosting. In actuality, smaller plan stats make for better hosting service(as long as your site will fit in there).

Great for start up web sites, medium traffic web sites, small-medium sized businesses, and personal type web pages

Price range $15.00-$30.00/m

Web hosting providers in this price range, for the most part, will offer you a lot more as far as a quality service is concerned. These providers will provide toll free phone support, excellent reliability, and some might even offer a fail-over service so that if the server you are on fails, another will pick up the traffic so that your site will see no downtime.

You will want to pay this much if you are looking for this type of service. If your web site makes you money every hour, than it is important that your website is up at all times. It will be advantageous for you to pay more for this higher quality service because it will probably save you money in the long run. Disk space and bandwidth will be really expensive, but depending on your web site it is worth it.

Corporate web sites, web pages that make a lot of money, or web pages with a lot of traffic should consider finding a shared web hosting plan in the $15-$30/m range.

One tip that will help you find a good host that is true most of the time is that the bigger the web hosting company and the more clients it has, the service you will receive will be less personalized. A smaller web host may offer you a more personalized service and you won’t be just a number out of 100,000 to them. The smaller host will work harder to get and keep your business.