How to Choose the Best Hosting Plan for Your Website

Many factors come into play before an individual or organization decides to purchase a hosting plan. It could range from cost factor, specifications of the server, server security, special features and many more. So what defines the best hosting plan for your requirement? It means choosing a web hosting plan with the right features and sufficient capacity while at the same time keeping your costs as low as possible. At ServerFreak, we offer you the luxury to choose from several web hosting options. The question is how do you know which hosting plan is the right option for you? Here are some tips on how to select the best web hosting plan for your website, from both business and technical perspective.

The Basic Level: Shared Hosting

The shared hosting is the beginner hosting plan in every hosting company. In fact, the shared hosting is the most common and popular option among bloggers and small business owners.

In a shared hosting, your website will reside on a server (a physical computer) together with hundreds of other websites i.e. you are sharing the space with multiple website owners on a single server.  The main benefit of shared hosting is that the costs are low and affordable, however, the downside is that you are sharing the server resources as well as space: things like memory and the processor, which can have a direct impact on the performance of your website.  The most common problem encountered with shared hosting is the site loading speed. For example, if one of the hundreds of websites that are hosted along with your website starts to receive enormous loads of traffic, your website might face extremely slow loading speed or even offline during worst case scenario.  The slow loading speed can directly impact your work as a blogger or even causing potential loss of sale especially among e-commerce website owners.

For small businesses in general, the shared hosting features and specs can already fulfil their requirement.  This particularly applies if your website is a small online shop, a blog, a brochure-style website or a combination of these things. However, if your website is bigger though, or it is starting to grow at enormous pace, then you will need to consider upgrading your hosting plan to a bigger plan i.e. moving up to the next stages of hosting. On a side note, if slow loading speed of your website happens regularly and deemed unacceptable to you, you need to move on to the next hosting plan.

Need More Power? Try These Options

You will know this is happening when your IT guys starts to sound like Scotty in Star Trek demanding more power from his ship. You have two main options if you need more power for your servers:

• Cloud Server
• Dedicated Server

Cloud servers are considered as the “upgraded” version of shared hosting. With Cloud server, your website will be hosted in a group of server with multiple websites. But the main difference with shared hosting is that your website now will have its own specific allocation of resources. In cloud server, you do not get all of the memory, space and processing speed of the server, however, you get more than you do compare to what you get in a shared hosting plan. With cloud server, you can now have a peace of your mind knowing that it is less likely that a website on the same server as you will cause your website to go offline.

Meanwhile, a dedicated server will allow you 100% full control as you are the only website on the machine. There will be no one sharing the server resources unlike shared hosting. As a result, you get the maximum possible amount of space and performance. That is the main advantage with dedicated servers but two main downsides exist:

• Dedicated server is the most expensive option
• Dedicated server is the most difficult to set up and maintain – the maintenance and setup that comes as standard on shared or VPS servers either has to be done by you, or you have to pay more to your host

In short, cloud servers offer a good middle-of-the-road option.

In conclusion, below is the quick summary to sum up the difference between these 3 servers and hopefully this will help you to make a better informed decision before considering purchasing or upgrading your hosting plan. Be a savvy ServerFreak customer today!

• Shared hosting– suitable for smaller websites with small to moderate amounts of traffic. Suitable if your website is lightweight and consumes low server resources.
• Cloud server– if you run a bigger website, with higher traffic or want to reduce the possibility of your website going offline.

• Dedicated hosting – if you run a really big website, or want more control over how it’s configured. No sharing of server resources i.e. 100% fully dedicated for your own use. Robust and able to withstand sudden spike in traffic.

P/S: Any more questions pertaining shared hosting, virtual private servers or even dedicated servers? Please feel free to reach out to us at ServerFreak today at [email protected]