Pros and Cons of the Most Popular Hosting Plans
Your decision to establish a business online means that you will have to decide between the best web hosting plans for your business. Many options are available to you, but your final choice must be based on the storage needs of your site, its size, the bandwidth required, the quantity of your website traffic, and the pros and cons of different hosting plans.
Having said that, even before you consider choosing the best plan, take a hard look at the company first. Even if a plan looks appealing in print, if the company provides unreliable hosting and poor service, you will regret your decision and your business will suffer. You can always Google hosting companies and compare their reputation and consumer reviews before selecting a hosting plan they offer — of course, you can use this site as a resource, as well it’s all here for you.
The Big Three – Web Hosting Plans
The three main hosting plans are as follows:
Shared hosting
This hosting plan is the most inexpensive, and is well suited for small websites and for webmasters who manage a number of small websites.
If you choose this type of hosting plan, you will be sharing the resources of a single server with a number of different websites (or accounts). These resources include the IP address, the disk space, processor power, memory, as well as the bandwidth.
Your hosting company will allocate a maximum amount of bandwidth and disc space that can be used each month for your account, and you will be charged monthly for the allocation given to you. However, exceeding that amount will incur temporary site shut down or large penalties.
The lower cost of this plan is its main benefit, and its greatest disadvantage is the reduced bandwidth that you will have to share with other accounts. If the traffic to your sites increases, the limited bandwidth will result in slow loading pages for visitors who are able to access them, while other visitors may be shut out altogether.
Dedicated Server Hosting
If your website’s traffic grows larger than can be supported by the bandwidth of a shared server, the solution would be to move your site to a dedicated server.
When you select a dedicated hosting plan, the server resources belong to you to do whatever you want. Since you have complete access to all the bandwidth of the server, you can set up one site or a number of different sites on it.
You will find that these servers run faster, can be customized and are more secure than shared servers. The main disadvantage of the dedicated server is that it costs a few hundred dollars per month in hosting fees. However, since the sites installed on them are very large sites with high traffic, the hosting cost is a drop in the bucket compared to the revenues earned by them monthly
Reseller Hosting
This type of hosting plan is an inexpensive way for you to make big profits online using a shared server account. This type of hosting plan allows you to host accounts of your clients on your server by creating packages for their sites. In these packages you allocate specific disk space, email addresses, and bandwidth for the sites. As a reseller, you will charge a monthly hosting fee to your clients.
The benefit of a reseller hosting plan is the inexpensive monthly hosting fee that may be as little as $20. If you need additional bandwidth, it can be purchased for as little as an additional $40. Another advantage of this type of hosting plan is the large amount of revenue that can be generated by charging clients for the hosting of their sites.
These are the basic facts on the main web hosting plans available today. They are available from most hosting companies, so do you due diligence, determine your specific needs, and then choose the best web hosting plans for your needs.
Tags: dedicated, reseller, shared, web hosting, web hosting plans