When a small business is just starting, there are various things that its owner needs to take care of. One of the most important ones being the relevance in today’s business climate, digital presence seems to occupy a leading role in the preparation of a company launch.
This is unequivocally true when it comes to contemporary web businesses where the digital realm is all that one has. This is why creating a website is a priority to any newborn enterprise looking to embrace the new age of technology and remain relevant meanwhile.
Websites, however, might seem to require quite an investment and when just starting, this might seem like something you could afford. So how much does web hosting cost and is it possible to get the best service without breaking the bank?
When to Consider Free Hosting?
Free hosting is a web service that provides the most foundational necessities of hosting a website. The features offered by different providers vary with many of them imposing restrictions on resource usage or uptime.
Usage restrictions are typically imposed on the resources a web hosting client has such as their disk space and monthly traffic. These are often the factors that affect all the users on the free shared hosting server and limitations are required to maintain the well-being of all of them. This leads us to uptime restrictions. Uptime restrictions usually mean having your website sleep for a certain period of time during the day and thus, not being up. To be honest, this is not a very common practice and is mainly imposed in order for users to have incentives to upgrade to premium plans.
Whether you are a small business or a blogger just getting started, there are multiple reasons to consider free web hosting as your trampoline to success. Some of the main necessities of any small website are reasonable disk space and customer support. Looking into these with respect to your future usage will help you decide whether you can fit into the offered resources or you expect your project to get larger.
At first, it might be difficult to measure the prospective resources your website will require once it’s up and running. To do so, you will need an overview of the expected traffic driven to your website, the storage space you will most likely need, and the number of MySQL databases you’ll use.
As you can guess, this is information that even the largest web projects cannot predict precisely. Because of this, free web hosting can provide an insight into the expected resource consumption
At AwardSpace, the safety of our users remains a top priority for us. Furthermore, the care we invest in free users does not artificially restrict the features included in our free hosting package. This is what helps us evolve as our customers do and learn as we go together.
Which Premium Hosting to Choose?
‘Premium’ hosting is an umbrella term for all web hosting services which are paid. These include shared, dedicated, and VPS hosting. As different as they are from each other, each of them has inner divisions into plans which providers prepare for their customers’ needs.
Shared hosting, for instance, varies immensely from basic plans to more advanced ones, both in terms of price and features.
For instance, our Basic Shared Hosting plan includes the following features:
- Two websites
- ~ 15 000 visits monthly
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited monthly traffic
- Free SSL & HTTPS
- 24 х 7 Support
- 1-hour response time
These are the basic characteristics of the service which will not change or be interrupted as your contract remains valid. Because of this notion, a user can be confident that when purchasing a cheap web hosting plan, he’s actually able to detect and monitor the performance of what he has paid for. And this is a quality that a 21st-century consumer needs to obtain.
For comparison, semi-dedicated hosting is oriented towards providing a more resourceful, faster, and stronger service to customers. Because of this, users get much more processing power, fewer usage limitations, fewer accounts on servers, and much more resources. This, of course, comes with a price. Features include:
- Unlimited domains
- Unlimited visits monthly
- Unlimited disk space
- One free domain for life
- Free SSL & HTTPS
- 24 х 7 Support
- 1-hour response time
On the other hand, VPS hosting is a completely self-controlled service where the user has all the power they need to regulate their resources. In this case, the web project that needs hosting is usually a huge number of websites with multiple subdomains and large files. Our Starter VPS plan includes:
- 1 vCPU, 100% CPU
- 1 GB RAM
- 25 GB Disk Space
- 2 TB Monthly Traffic
- 50 Mbit/s Bandwidth
- 1 IP address
We, however, do not typically recommend getting VPS hosting for small businesses for two main reasons. The most obvious is that beginners’ websites do not require the resources that are included in the plan and thus, this would be an unnecessary investment. Also, VPS hosting requires some technical knowledge which can be applied mainly by coding. Unless you would consider yourself as having a coding bone, VPS hosting might appear intimidating to a beginner.
In conclusion
Web presence is an essential requirement for the contemporary transfer of information. Almost all human behavior has a digital alternative duplicating our communication, patterns of trust, and desires.
With free hosting, all of the necessary resources are available completely free of charge. There are, however, cases where users need to develop and grow websites which result in successful digital projects requiring the necessary resources.
Any financial expenses that will follow are simply part of the process of growing and prospering as a small business and its digital presence makes the whole endeavor worth it. And that’s the actual investment needed for creating something yourself.