Before purchasing any hosting plan, you need to know everything about website hosting costs. Various plans start from $1 per month to $2000 per month. It might force you to think that how much should you pay for web hosting? Are you overpaying for Web Hosting, and how much does web hosting will cost?
You need to find the best web hosting plan for you from the 300,000 web hosting providers available in the market. Selecting the best hosting provider for yourself from a bundle of hosting providers can be very difficult for you.
Through this article, you will learn the truth about web hosting costs, and you will know what you need and what you should pay for hosting plans. While shopping, you should identify the costs associated with web hosting and evaluate those costs.
Tool for keeping web hosting costs low
Bluehost is the tool for keeping web hosting costs low. Bluehost has more than two million sites worldwide, and it is considered an industry leader in the web hosting space. They think about everyone, whether you are starting a blog, or already have millions of monthly visits sites. They have packages for everyone.
Bluehost is not only the cheapest in the market. But other service providers offer free web hosting for less than a dollar. But I recommend not go for free web hosting services as there is always a catch.
Bluehost worth the money as they offer a basic plan for beginners and a business plan for build up websites. Bluehost web hosting services will keep other costs low over time.
In this article, you will learn more about general web hosting costs, and we explain how Bluehost help to save your money in some of these categories.
Let us begin:
Cost 1: Web Hosting Type
The type of Web Hosting plan you choose will indeed have a significant influence on price. Here is the order listed from cheapest to expensive hosting.
- Shared Web Hosting
- Cloud Web Hosting
- Virtual private server (VPS) web hosting
- Dedicated Web Hosting
This order is considered as the “Thumb Rule”. Therefore, cloud hosting and VPS hosting can be switched depending upon the hosting provider.
When we check the Bluehost pricing page then there is a significant price gap between every plan type. The price of a dedicated server is approximately 20 times higher than the shared hosting plan.
The majority of new websites prefer shared hosting plans unless they are expecting a huge surge in traffic. Through this, you can save some bucks and you always have the option to upgrade as traffic increases on your website.
The most website uses shared hosting plan that can manage around 10,000 to 25,000 monthly visits. But the website starts getting monthly visits of more than 50,000 then, consider upgrading your plan to VPS or cloud package. Until your website reaches 100,000 monthly visits, then consider an upgrade plan to the dedicated hosting server.
Cost 2: Contract Length
It is common, if you are dealing with a longer duration contract, then you get the lowest possible rate. For new customers, this way can be best to save more money on web hosting.
Plans are offered in 12, 24, 36, and 48-month contract terms, depending on the provider. To play long and save more money then you must at least commit for a year, which is minimum.
Bluehost will provide different price offer which is based on contract length. You might notice, there is a $2/month difference in price between the 36 months and 12-month contract. This saved seems like peanuts, at the end of 36 months you save over $72, which makes a difference.
Here I remembered one quote, that goes as;
“A single penny if accumulated makes a whole difference”
So, you need to pay upfront for your contract in full at the time of sign up.
Cost 3: Renewal Rates
Taking long-term contracts will helps you to avoid renewal rates for the plans. It was a practice among web hosting industry providers that they offer low promotional rates and then jack up the price at the time of contract renewal.
Let me clear one thing, it’s not like they are not upfront about rates but most people don’t think of the costs they are going to incur three, four years down the line. Even some providers double, triple, or quadruple rates upon renewal.
Here, we closely evaluate the shared hosting packages from Bluehost. So, in Bluehost, the renewal rate is more than double the introductory price. But this is reasonable when compared to some of the other web hosting providers available on the market.
You can not do anything to avoid this increase then the best thing is to go for a long-term contract. That is the best and suited way to save some extra money from web hosting. As your website traffic grows then this extra cost of renewal will not poke you.
Cost 4: Hosting Resources
Along with a web hosting plan, you will get some resources for your website. But they might vary from one provider to another. So, understand what you expect from the provider:
- Bandwidth – The data transfer speed.
- CPUs – To handle all requests on your site, Central Processing Units will help you.
- RAM – To process multiple requests, you require Short-term memory.
- SSD Storage – Maximum permission size for your website.
The more resources you add, the cost of web hosting will increase. In Bluehost, the SSD Storage, RAM, and Bandwidth increase in every plan. But the number of CPU cores remains the same in the standard and enhanced plan but just doubled at the Ultimate package level.
In the market, you will meet some web hosting providers that claim to offer “unlimited” or “Unmetered bandwidth”. Then you must aware that you are not getting unlimited bandwidth as it does not even exist. Unlimited Bandwidth means that you can use bandwidth within a particular range offered by the provider. Best servers will also provide limited bandwidth. So, don’t get trapped in the marketing tactics.
If your website traffic varies from month to month then cloud hosting allows you to scale your resources on-demand to accommodate traffic spikes.
Cost 5: Setup Fees and Site Migrations
Yes, it is true, that most web hosting providers offer you free setups for only entry-level packages such as shared hosting plans. But in case the provider will take in-depth steps to get your work started then you might get some setup fees. At the dedicated server level, setup fees are common as they need to physically add hardware according to your plan requests.
You will experience a site migration fee for transferring your website from one hosting to another. For site transfer, Bluehost will charge only $149.99. However, other providers offer free migration services. It is not recommended to migrate your website on your own so, pay the charges and remain tension-free.
Cost 6: Domain Registration
Get the best-suited domain name from a domain registrar and the best hosting package from the web hosting provider. Usually, people mix domain registration and web hosting, so, wouldn’t confuse. As they are up to your choice only.
Through Bluehost, new websites can bundle the two. As new customers get a free domain for one year with a web hosting subscription. If you get your domain name directly from the registrar then it is considered cheaper in long run. However, Bluehost’s domain renewal rate is higher but the added cost is marginal.
It is much easier to pile everything under one roof rather than using different platforms for the domain name and hosting plan. So, think wisely before going for domain registration.
Till now, we have discussed 6 different website hosting costs. Website Hosting costs are web hosting type, contract length, renewal rates, hosting resources, setup fees, and site migrations, and domain registration. Other website hosting costs help you to save some more bucks. So, keep reading.
Cost 7: Security
Every website needs top-notch security. Different security measures should be added to your websites such as network protocols, spam filtering, malware scans, firewalls, and many more. But you will get additional security from your web hosting provider.
Every web host offers you a free SSL certificate, and this becomes an industry standard. Even you don’t prefer any host that did not provide a free SSL certificate. The security options will vary from provider to provider.
If we consider Bluehost, then SiteLock Security Essential provides you automated malware detection, unlimited page scans, blacklist monitoring, file-level scanning, automatic malware removal, and many more in just $2.99 per month.
Even you can skip these options and voluntarily damage your website security. In WordPress, there are plenty of WordPress security plugins available to secure your privacy and website security.
Cost 8: Managed Support and Server Maintenance
Managed web hosting has become popular but this term has different meanings according to the plan and providers. The managed web host will take care of all the server operations behind the scene that includes setup, maintenance, server monitoring, support updates, and many more.
The Bluehost plan for entry-level managed plan starts from $19.95/month which accommodates up to 50,000 monthly visitors and this plan will scale up to 500,000 monthly visitors.
In case you are using dedicated servers, then you think about the maintenance costs whereas dedicated servers are offered with managed or unmanaged options. When you compare side by side then the unmanaged plan is cheaper but you are going to bear the maintenance cost and updates the server on your own. If you are a technical person then you go for it. If not then it’s better to get a managed plan from your hosting provider.
Cost 9: Package Extras
When you go shopping, you will get many different offers that attract you, those offers are considered upsells. The same thing goes with Web hosting. As you simply control yourself from some extra shopping, perform the same thing with web hosting, just skip the unnecessary add ons.
In case the basic plan will cost you around $142.20, after adding some extra to your plan then the total directly climbs up to $277.83. Many providers around us, will offer add-ons but Bluehost does not offer any extra add-ons.
Here comes the important point to know about what to select and what not to select.
If you are getting a free SSL certificate then a single-domain SSL certificate is not necessary. You don’t need to add marketing or SEO tools. If you are not taking security features then adding security features is a good option.
Cost 10: Downtime
Downtime is considered as an indirect cost of web hosting is you will not see on your bill. But whenever your site goes down due to a server crash or network error. This will cost you money and the type of website and monetization strategy will show exactly how much money you lost.
By using uptime monitoring from Pingdom, you will see how different web hosts stack up with each other. Just remember don’t look at uptime guarantee from a hosting provider and think that you are in good shape. These guarantees often come with all types of contingencies and in case they fail to meet the uptime agreement then you just get credit off from future bills.
Remember always looks for reviews to see what people have to say about the uptime reliability from different web hosting providers and however, frequent downtime will be costly on a long-term basis.
Conclusion
Through this article, you will get an idea of the top 10 costs that are associated with web hosting. To host a website, the total cost will depend on several factors.
If you understood, what to look at web hosting cost then it is easy to monitor your web-hosting cost. There are many web hosting service providers available, but to save money through web hosting then consider Bluehost. When you sign up with Bluehost, you will get a free SSL Certificate, and free domain name.
I hope you will get all answers through this article and clear many doubts regarding payments. Through these methods, you can save a lot of money and can build a sustainable website.
