One of the first things your going to find when starting a website is you need a place for your website to live and that is referred to as Web Hosting.
The next thing you will find is there is way too many options and people will quickly just go to recognized names like GoDaddy or Name or Gater Hosting as they happened to see a tv commercial about it.
I know it seems overwhelming but don’t fret you don’t need to jump into any package just yet. Web hosting isn’t a one size fits all (despite what they claim) some are better for certain types of websites.
This is where your web developer can come in and make recommendations for you that will ease your decision making.
I want to give you a bit of information will:
- Make the decision more comfortable for you
- Give you a better understanding of what your buying
- Understand how much you should be paying.
I’m going to Focus on WordPress based hosting as that is the Main CMS Platform that I work with and it’s also the platform for around 25% of all the websites on the web.
Small to Midsize Businesses Web Hosting
Hosting companies will put out ton of information on packages to make you think they a bigger and better. However most of the time the bigger packages aren’t getting you anything you need and remember if your website takes off to those 20,000 visitors a month you can always upgrade your hosting package.
I”m sure you’ve seen Tier’s like this
They Bombard you with information with each one costing more it’s not clear on what Do you need and how much should you pay? They also like to make it seem more complicated with a lot of info boxes (the questions marks in this case) where they can say hey I know this is what we said but here is a bunch of text saying it’s not really quite that.
You will find some that have a very clear plan and I’ve taken the liberty to highlight the pieces that are important for 90% websites need for on going hosting.
Shared Web Hosting
What you want to have for on going hosting:
- 10 gb to Unlimited Website Space
- 10 gb to Unlimited Bandwidth
For these both keep in mind you would have to have a 100 page website with likely 10,000 visitors a day to chew up 10gb of bandwidth in a month. Unless your website has 1mb images and loads of video. - Extra Domain Names – If you will have more than one website on this package make sure that your hosting allows for multiple domain names always good for creating micro sites in the future.
- Sub-Domains – Sub domains are great for creating certain types of landing pages so you will definitely want this.
- Hosting Support – Some have great response times others can take days to respond.
- Email to create email address and inboxes that have your domain name ex. george@thedss.ca
Price : Shared Hosting is $8 to $15 per month with possible discounts
Now that I’ve armed you with some information you can have a bit more confidence and knowledge in what your looking at. Check back soon I’ll be doing an article on Web Hosting Top Picks and the Top We Avoid.
