How to choose hosting: the real cost of cheap
What's the difference between a 2-dollar plan and a 20-dollar one? Five things to check when choosing hosting, and the hidden price of cheap plans.
Hosting is the ground your site stands on. Bad hosting makes even an excellent site slow, unreachable and insecure.
What happens on cheap plans
On very low-cost shared hosting, hundreds of sites share one server. If one of your neighbours gets a traffic spike or runs a badly written plugin, your site slows down too. It's called the bad-neighbour effect, and it's outside your control.
Five things to check
1. Server location. If your visitors are in one country, the server should be near them. Every request to a server on another continent carries extra delay from physical distance alone.
2. Disk type. It should be SSD or NVMe. Plans still selling spinning disks exist, and the difference is visible.
3. Software versions. Does it support current PHP and database versions? Old versions are both slower and less secure.
4. Backups. Are daily backups automatic, and does restoring one cost extra? Find this out when buying, not when something breaks.
5. Support. How long until you reach an actual person? When your site goes down you can't wait 48 hours.
Shared, VPS or cloud?
- Shared hosting — fine for small brochure sites and low-traffic blogs.
- VPS — resources are reserved for you; the right step for e-commerce and medium traffic.
- Cloud / managed platforms — scale automatically with traffic and carry no maintenance burden.
Hidden costs
The renewal price of cheap plans is often two or three times the first year. Before buying, look at the renewal price, not the promotional one.
A practical rule
Whatever you hope to earn from the site each month, setting aside about one percent of it for hosting is a sensible starting point. Putting a store that expects serious monthly revenue on the cheapest plan isn't saving money — it's taking a risk.
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- #performance
