Decoding the Cost of Web Hosting
Search online for web hosting companies and you will get literally millions of results. How do you know which one to use? And how much is a good price to pay for the service?
First of all, let's talk about free hosting iPage Reviews 2017: 9 Things They Don't Tell You, which is naturally attractive but not always reliable. Your website can't be up there one minute and gone the next. You have to be consistently accessible, and unfortunately, that is a problem with free providers. Two other issues are poor customer service and the barrage of ads on your page. If you want to create a professional image, these things hardly fit.
So how much is a fair price to pay for good web hosting? The answer depends mainly on the features you need. The two major things to consider when selecting a hosting package are bandwidth and storage.
Bandwidth is the volume of traffic your website can handle. If you're new, ten hits a day can be an achievement, but always leave room for expansion. Unlimited bandwidth - with a package cost of around $5 monthly - may seem too much as a start, but it's good if you're planning to grow your business later on. In the case of restricted bandwidth, let the company define it as a certain number of visitors per day or per week.
As for storage space, also known as disk space, the price will be based again on the type of website you own. If it's static HTML, it will require less disk space than a site that streams audio or maintains a user database, for instance. A static page requires just around 10GB storage, while media-smarter sites will likely need about fifteen times more space.
Security is yet another important factor to look into. You can pay an extra $30-50 yearly for a package that includes SSL. If you handle sell products, handle payments or keep sensitive customer information in your site, SSL is a must and read ipage hosting reviews.
So how much is a fair price enough for web hosting? If you're not a huge business, $5 to $7 monthly is good. The larger your website, the bigger your bandwidth and storage requirements, so the higher your costs will be. Free or dirt-cheap offers can be very tempting, but you will grow out of them before you know it, and the ads, inferior customer service and inconsistency can leave more damage to your professional image than you can imagine. If you're only hosting a single site with minimum media, a $3 economy deal is good. Leave big packages alone unless you're a developer.
