For you to come across this blog article, we assume that you have already made the firm decision to create your own website to serve your business, your non-profit causes, or simply your creative activities or hobbies. Every single person making a website for the first time is usually very surprised when they find out that there is a variety of server types and hosting plans, as well as their features and prices are completely different.
We have always advised our customers to follow one basic principle when deciding whether to choose a shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud-based, or any other type of server for their website. Scilicet, never pay for any feature you don’t really need. The best thing about the hosting business is that almost all hosting companies allow their customers to upgrade their plan to a higher one anytime the necessity for more resources appears.
A Shared or Another Server?
Shared hosting plans stand out from the rest by being the cheapest of all other available plans, with shared servers providing shelter to multiple sites that use the same resources together. Sometimes, when another site has too much traffic at a certain period of time, this can lead to temporary and short-term (no more than a few hours) inabilities for people to easily access your site. This is the main reason why many people have serious doubts about using shared hosting plans or paying for the more expensive hosting services where this problem is impossible due to their resources being individual.
Another issue that often makes people hesitate to choose a shared hosting service is that in case of a malicious attack on another website that is based on the same server, the entire server may suffer and crash. Thus, your website might be destroyed as well. However, this is not a problem at all with hosting companies like Hostens, which provides daily backups of your website data. In case your site was affected by a server attack, it can very quickly be restored to the latest backup version made no longer than 24 hours ago.
Will my Site Perform Effectively if I Choose a Shared Web Hosting Plan?
Myths about the ineffectiveness of shared hosting plans are very popular online, and they often trick many novice website owners into paying for services they do not really need. The truth is that almost all shared hosting plans have more than enough resources to meet the needs of any website that will be attracting low to medium traffic. In most cases, these plans provide even more than the necessary resources.
Nearly every single beginner website needs minimum traffic. And over time, by using a shared hosting plan, the web page may get more and more popular, and it would probably be able to reach medium traffic without any problem.
Therefore, we strongly recommend you not be misled by marketing gimmicks and start your website with a shared hosting plan. Without a doubt, this is the most affordable plan, and its resources are quite enough to satisfy the needs of any website beginner. In case your site gradually becomes really popular and starts attracting even international traffic, you could always transfer your website to a VPS, cloud-based, or dedicated server, again depending on your real necessities.
What Sites is the Shared Hosting Plan Suitable for?
As already mentioned, shared hosting is ideal for all websites that need low to medium traffic. The shared hosting plan works great for the following exemplary types of beginner websites:
- Beginner e-commerce business sites
- Regular business websites
- Personal and creative blogs
- Blogs in photography, history, politics, science, etc.
- Non-profit websites
- Websites of non-governmental organizations
- Web pages of public institutions such as schools, kindergartens, clinics, etc.
No matter exactly why you need to create your own website, the shared hosting plan will serve perfectly well to support any web page that has up to an average number of daily visitors.
What to Look for When Choosing a Shared Web Hosting Plan?
While a shared web hosting plan is perfect for almost all novice website owners, there are still some specific features that vary between different hosting companies. Therefore, here we present to you the 4 most important tips that you should comply with when choosing a shared web hosting plan, so you could make sure you choose the most favorable option.
Tip #1: Evaluate your real technical needs and consider your requirements
Before you choose a web hosting plan, you should evaluate what your real needs of resources are. Always carefully check the page presenting the technical specifications on the particular provider’s website, so you can make sure they respond to the requirements of the content management platform (CMS) or code language on which your website will be built. For instance, if your website is based on PHP, you should check if the provider maintains PHP.
You must also evaluate well your real possibilities, which sometimes differ from our expectations, so you could define what traffic parameters will be best for you. If you expect about 500, 1000, and up to 1200-1300 visitors per 24 hours (or no more than 50-60 visits per hour), a shared hosting plan will do a really great job for your website initiative.
Concerning the overall content that your site will store on the server, you should evaluate well what storage space you will need. For most beginner websites 10GB would be pretty good. In case you will be regularly posting many photos and videos, then you could choose a shared hosting plan with a website memory of 20-30GB and more. Usually, most shared plans offer up to 50-100GB of disk space, and the price of the specific shared hosting plan is related to the memory storage it offers. But most people do just fine with 10-20GB.
Tip #2: Check if the plan offers backups
Once you have evaluated your real technical specification needs, it is time to check if the shared hosting plan that responds to them performs regular backups. As we already mentioned above, backups are a very important feature as they could keep your website safe in case of a crash due to malicious activities.
Decent hosting providers perform automatic backups on a daily basis. Even if the hosting plan includes regular backups, it is advisable to check if your hosting provider has indeed enabled them, as sometimes they forget to do so, and this can cost you losing your entire website.
That is why it is very important that the provider you choose is responsible. It is preferable to choose a hosting company with years of experience, not just some random individual host. We do not claim that it is not possible for an individual host to do their job wonderfully and responsibly. If you have a trusted one, do not hesitate to choose them. But if they are unknown to you, they just offer cheap hosting services and you entrust your site to them, chances are you are not leaving your site in good hands.
Tip #3: Look for reviews from real users
Choosing a good hosting provider is made much easier by the fact that nowadays there are amazing platforms where real service users can leave their authentic feedback about how satisfied they are. Thus, any potential customer of a web hosting company can check whether it is worth using the services of any particular hosting provider and avoid potential disappointment.
The most popular and reputable platform for customer feedback is Trustpilot. It is a Danish review website for authentic reviews of businesses all over the world with nearly a million new comments and assessments every month, which is available in English. Hostens, for instance, is rated 4.8 out of 5 stars, which is a really excellent rating. 86% of all evaluations are with 5 stars (which is the maximum possible rating), only 6% have rated them with 4 stars, and another 6% have evaluated them with the lowest 1 star.
Another platform where you could check the rating of a hosting provider is Hostadvice.com. There you can read reviews of real users, as well as a detailed review of the specific hosting company written by an expert. On this platform, Hostens has a pretty good rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars. The best-rated feature of Hostens there is the price with 4.6 stars, and the least-rated is the variety of features (4.4 stars).
Tip #4: Check the quality of the customer support
Imagine the unpleasant situation when it is Friday evening, you have a problem with your website’s server, but you cannot get in touch with anyone until Monday morning because your hosting provider’s customer support only works on weekdays from 9 to 5. This would definitely lead to a lot of unnecessary annoyance for you. And it could often make it impossible for your site to be visited for the entire weekend. If you use your site for business, this troublesome situation could bring not only emotional but also monetary losses for you.
To skip the above losses, it is very important that the hosting company you choose for your new website provides responsive, really helpful, and proactive customer support that is available to the clients every day.
Most hosting companies offer email and live chat support, and less often they offer phone line customer service. Typically, when available, telephone customer service is ready to help during certain hours on weekdays. But there are also hosting companies like Hostens that offer 24/7 customer support via email and live chat. In this way, every day you can count on a team of experts on duty to meet any problem you may have.
Final words
You now know the main tips to consider when choosing a web hosting plan, and you can make a sensible choice for your new website. As you already know well what is very important to take into account when choosing a shared web hosting plan, you can now relax and enjoy other useful treats that hosting companies offer in their packages. These, for example, could be a large number of emails with your website domain, a free website builder, a free SSL certificate, and several others.
But do not forget the most important rule we mentioned above: Do not pay for anything you do not really need. To this rule, we would also like to add one additional clarification: Do not hesitate to subscribe for things you would really benefit from, especially when the particular shared hosting provider is a decent one.