When you start building a website for your small business one of the first things you will need to figure out is what type of hosting you will purchase. Hosting is the server space where you will store all of the files for your website so that they can be accessed through your domain (which is a separate thing and doesn’t have to be purchased from the same company). Website hosting runs the gamut from budget shared hosting with GreenGeeks for about $1/month all the way up to dedicated servers and managed hosting that comes with its own support team for hundreds of dollars per month. As a small business you are probably looking to get the most bang for your buck, so we will outline two options that we usually recommend to our clients.
VPS Hosting
This is our top recommendation for clients, because it provides the most flexibility and security. If you use some of the great coupon codes found here at this link you can save yourself a lot of money too. So what is VPS Hosting? Well it stands for Virtual Private Server, it’s halfway between a deluxe hosting server and a dedicated server. You do not have a fixed amount of storage and RAM and you can adjust them as necessary. It gives you a lot of flexibility, without having to pay for a dedicated server when you don’t need it yet.
While your website might start off with low amounts of traffic, if you run a really successful marketing campaign or have a blog post that goes viral the sudden spike in traffic can cause huge problems if you aren’t set up with hosting that can handle it. At best your website will run very slowly (because your bandwidth is topping out) or at worst the site won’t load at all because the server is just too overwhelmed. With VPS Hosting, that’s no problem!
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is definitely your cheapest option, but you get only what you pay for and are limited in what you can do. You will have a fixed and finite amount of storage, bandwidth limitations, and you are more vulnerable to XSS attacks. If you don’t ever expect to have a significant amount of traffic coming into your website and you don’t need to be serving a lot of large photos or video then it might be completely adequate for your needs and your most cost-effective option. Most hosts will give you the option to upgrade your account down the road if you find you are outgrowing your shared hosting plan.
Really make sure to take some time to consider what kind of website you will need, and how much traffic you expect to get in both the short and long term. If you hire a web developer or a firm, ask their opinion as well!