Choosing the Wrong Web Hosting Plan Can Spell Disaster

You’ve gotten the idea that you want to have your own website. It could be for a school project, a home-based business idea, to put a freelance site online to represent yourself instead of relying on Facebook, or for something else entirely. Whatever your reason, choosing the wrong web hosting plan will certainly spell disaster for your plans. When you try to be cheap at the beginning, you might find yourself with too few options and let down badly if the site goes offline unexpectedly with surprise downtime. 

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When Is Cheap Too Cheap with Hosting?

Not every host is born equal. Some web hosts offer shared hosting plans that pile hundreds of customers onto overloaded, slow web servers that cannot take the strain. This works fine when all the hosted sites individually receive little traffic, but should a small handful suddenly become popular overnight due to a series of articles that went viral on Reddit.com or Buzzfeed, the already strained server will quickly stop being able to handle page requests from site visitors.

With hosting, you usually get what you pay for. Shared hosting is certainly slower than virtual private server, cloud or dedicated hosting in almost every scenario, but they’re not all the same. Siteground, for instance, suggests customers limit their GrowBig packages to 25,000 monthly visitors with the next level up having a suggested maximum of 100,000 visitors per month. Compared to cheaper hosts that make no such suggestions and include “unlimited bandwidth” in their list of package features (often with vague fair use limits), Siteground tends to be highly rated for site speed. To compare different hosting options and providers, check out Hosting Review for the latest ratings.

When Is a Web Host Not Really a Web Host?

GoDaddy is primarily a domain name registrar first and a web host second. The same can be said of NameCheap or Name.com; both offer market-leading domain registration services but also have shared hosting too. The question is whether you’ll get top-notch hosting support and service when it’s not their primary business models? The jury is out.

Expandability?

Can a web host expand with a growing site? This is a great question to ask when looking at a host’s range of packages. Where the emphasis is on cheap shared hosting and not virtual private servers, dedicated servers or cloud server options, then if your site gets busy and really slows down, what will you do?

It’s often helpful to go with a mid-tier web host and not the least expensive with a limited range of poorly-defined hosting plans available. While it might cost a bit more per month, what you’re getting in most cases is better qualified technical staff, enthusiastic support, and technical redundancies built-in to avoid getting hit with prolonged downtime. The last thing you need with a rapidly growing site is the hosting provider letting you down.

Getting the right team behind you by selecting a solid web host is a critical part of the mix whether you’re creating a dot com startup, a web app, a school project or a local business. Losing customers early on when you can least afford it is costly. Make sure you have the right technical backup behind you from the start to avoid taking the losses.