5 Tips for Choosing the Right Hosting Plan for Enterprises or Bloggers
Don’t think all hosting plans are the same. There are dedicated servers, shared hosting, WordPress hosting and others. Which poses the question which one should you choose so you get the flexibility and scalability for a fast-growing website?
Most common case scenarios – users don’t make an informed decision and purchase the cheapest hosting option available just because they think whatever they use, will serve their purpose and rarely see a quite more expensive plan as an investment. Unfortunately, very soon the-cheapest-to-go-with hosting plan turns out to be rather inefficient for:
- the specific needs and goals of clients/businesses
- the complexities of the website in particular
- a fast website load time to guarantee great UX
To benefit the most out of your hosting, there are several key factors to consider before jumping straight to purchasing one.
What you’ll learn in this article:
- What is hosting and why you need it?
- How many hosting options are generally available?
- How to choose the right hosting plan?
- What can we offer and why relying on BGOcloud hosting?
Let’s get started.
What Is Hosting and Why Do You Need It
If you want to be digitally and online-present – you need a reliable hosting service. Basically, it allocates a space on a web server where your website resides and stores all the files like HTML, CSS, and images that will keep it running, visible, and accessible.
We live in a highly digital world where experiences happen online. Product/service consumers, then, expect from any business to be able to at least give them a usable digital representation of what they offer.
So, it doesn’t really matter if you’re establishing a new business and you’re going with your first website or you’re creating your 10th e-commerce digital space already, or maybe even you’re a creative blogger who doesn’t really have huge requirements but simply needs to market his or her ideas.
You must first go with a hosting plan and go from there to establish your digital presence, introduce your business, and build consistent brand awareness
Web Host Options or How to Make the Difference
In general, hosting services provide several types of servers which can be generally narrowed down to the following categories:
- Shared hosting – An easy and reliable solution to host a personal blog or your first ever business website.
- Dedicated servers – Ideal for e-commerce site applications or SaaS project.
- WordPress hosting – It is the best option if you aim at building a website from the ground up easily without having to know how to code or create Adobe XD, Figma or Sketch designs. The intuitive interface and built-in tools make it a great fit for bloggers as well as for enterprise websites, or portfolio sites.
- KVM Virtual Private Servers – Suitable for high performance websites and advanced management.
- Mikrotik Routers – A full-featured virtual network router to set up fast and easy VPN or Web Proxy and transmit encrypted traffic.
5 Tips to Choose the Right Hosting Plan
There are several factors, bot measurable and more subjective, to take into account when choosing among several web hosting plans. The important thing is not to go for the cheapest hosting plan just because of the price. Sometimes paying more in the beginning (if can afford it) is a better ROI in the future. But don’t go for the most expensive one either if you don’t need the additional features or space it offers.
Our advice? Invest time researching and make an informed decision. To help you along the way, here are a few questions to ask yourself in advance:
- Will you need your own infrastructure?
- Will you need greater access or control over your server(s) and website?
- Are you technical enough or not?
And the top 5 most crucial things to consider:
1. Evaluate all the features and functionalities
Features are perhaps the most critical thing to pay attention to. That’s why you must have a clear idea as to what exactly you can and cannot do within the scope of each hosting plan. You might want to start small and you don’t want to pay for a hosting package that includes add-ons and extra services. However, if you want your business to grow or you deal with to resource heavy website, large scripts, and so forth – you need a scalable solution. Make sure the capacity of the hosting plan you are looking at will provide the necessary space and features for growth.
Key questions to consider in terms of features:
- Will the bandwidth provided serve the purpose of the website?
- How much disk space does each plan include?
- What is the monthly traffic limit?
- What should you do if you exceed usage?
- Does it include SEO tools and performance analytics capabilities?
What about free domain registration?
- Does the host use cPanel?
- Can you host one or multiple domains using one account?
- Is there an intuitive content management system or ability to easy install an open-source system like WordPress with tons of themes and features?
2. Guarantee your website and business security and efficient data backups
According to SiteLock’s analysis for 2021, “the average website experiences 94 attacks each day.” If you thought security isn’t something as important, think again. Security and data backups are essentials that mustn’t neglect when choosing your hosting plan and hosting provider.
Key questions to consider in terms of web hosting security and data backups:
- Are SSL Certificates provided or you’ll need to purchase one?
- Are there any automated data backups?
- What about closely guarded data centers?
- Does it provide 24/7 performance and threat monitoring as well?
3. Make sure you can trust the technical support
The provided support is extremely important for your hosting plan. Anything can happen to your server or website – a technical error or even a DNS attack. So, you need to be able to quickly have the problem resolved because everyone loves a 100% uptime and no one likes to see a 404-error message. This is a recipe for high bounce rates, bad UX, and end-users who never again return to the page.
Key questions to consider in terms of web hosting security and data backups:
- What are the available support channels: email, forums, live chat, telephone?
- How responsive is the technical team?
- Can you rely on them 24/7 or during office hours only?
4. Assess and compare price and subscription policies
Another crucial thing to do is to review the particular hosting company’s policy carefully and see what they guarantee, verify differences in sign-up prices, renewals, or simply to check any bottlenecks that may potentially affect the site performance and speed.
Key questions to consider in terms of web hosting price and subscription policies:
- How many web hosting plans do they offer?
- Is there a flexible set of web hosting options?
- What is the contract length?
- Are there monthly or early plans available?
- Do you have a strict budget you cannot exceed, or the price isn’t a factor?
- Are there long-term subscriptions only or you can end your plan whenever you want?
- Is there a money-back guarantee in case the plan doesn’t deliver what it says it will?
- Are there any additional renewal costs?
- Can you cancel your current plan and upgrade to a new one?
5. Evaluate your current needs and goals for the future
Before choosing a hosting plan, you must clarify your overall vision and purpose of your website, technical/non-technical skills, and so forth. Start by writing down a list of your needs then compare them to each hosting plan.
Key questions to consider here:
- Is your website going to operate in a specific niche?
- What is the type of your website and its purpose – enterprise, photography website, blog, e-commerce, or anything else?
- Do you need more bandwidth and security or you want storage features?
- What CMS are you going to use?
Why BGOcloud Hosting?
For years, we’ve been working with a range of clients, businesses, and creative minds which really helped us set up our own criteria for what we want to deliver. Taking into account the diversity of needs, expectations and goals all coupled by the extreme velocity in which today’s digital world evolves, we managed to work on several key pillars to set apart our hosting solutions.
Here’s what you get:
- All SSD speed
- Powerful hosting products
- 24/7/365 expert technical support
- Free website transfer
- Risk-free hosting
- Excellent SLA uptime guarantee of 99.9%
- 24/7/365 hosting monitoring
- IPv6
- Daily backups
- Complete resource isolation
- A safe place to host your site