What kind of hosting should I go with?
By: Brendan Fitzpatrick
Hosting web sites can be a major dilemma depending on your needs. For most people, the $5 plan from any hosting company will provide you with more than what you need. However, if you have an idea and want to take it to the next level, your concern might be “what if it takes off?” .. There are a few things that you can ask yourself first that will help you answer your own concerns.
First, determine what your site does. Are you only offering information? Are you allowing users to login and and are you serving dynamic (server side) content? Do you expect 10’s of users, 100’s, 1,000’s or 10’s of thousands of users? Regardless, 99% of new web sites (even if you are the next google or facebook) you will be able to survive at least 6 months on a small to medium web hosting plan ($20/month or less).
You also have to ask yourself if your income is coming from paid subscriptions or advertising. If you are earning $50/client per month and you have 100 clients per month ($5,000/month) then you owe your clients a high level of service so a $200/month web hosting plan is probably in order regardless of usage. If you’re earning $100/month or $1,000/month you have to look at your usage reports, if your traffic is global (ie. coming from many countries) you shouldn’t have a concern unless you are approaching 2,000 unique visitors per day. This is assuming that your site is relatively optimized.
There are 100’s of reseller plans out there. I pay $20/month and I host over 20 web sites, my top site receives over 1 million unique visitors per year and I won’t need to upgrade any time soon. Don’t get me wrong, when my site goes down for a few hours I feel it, but I’ve been able to justify sticking with my $20/month plan. If my site experienced much more than 6 hours/month downtime it would immediately justify a $50/month or more plan.