Web Hosting Options - there's many different options and things to consider

There are so many different kinds of web hosts these days. You can get a basic web site hosted on the net for around $10 per month. Robust hosting can easily be $200 per month and more. Some web sites requires clusters of web servers to keep up with demand.

When I am looking for a web host to consider suggesting for or using for a client, the host is going to be different for different people and situations. I might suggest godaddy for hosting for one person and hostgator for someone else. Other people might get a completely different type of hosting suggestion based on their technical expertise and the needs of their web apps.

This page is assuming small business users and hobby web site makers who are not linux admins. If you are an expert with linux and command line server automation, then this guide is not for you, as I will be leaving out many options like digital ocean, and focusing on sites that have tech support and graphical control panels.

Support is the second most important thing when it comes to web hosting!

What happens if you find out your web site is down. No one can get it to come up. Who ya gonna call?

Some web hosting companies don't even have a phone number. I have some web sites on a server that only offers support via chat messages. There are some that do email, and not all hosts have tech support available 24/7.

There are hosting options for under $10 per month, and if that's all you can afford for now that's fine. However if your site being knocked offline for three days would cost you more than $10 in lost business, then I suggest moving on up to a place that charges more and has a staff of tech support available 24/7 via email and phone.

Sadly, I have seen, and used some hosting companies that advertise they have 24 / 7 tech support, only to find out when I tried to use them, there was no answer. Now this could happen to any of them during a massive disruption when a thousand sites are down at once. However if you call on an idle Tuesday at 1am for an issue and they can't get to you, it might be time to find a different option.

I expect tech support at a professional hosting company to at least answer an email within 1 hour. If they consistently take longer than that I start to weigh how much of a discount I am getting from that provider. Some businesses would lose a million bucks if they were offline for an hour, so the level of tech support needed and you may be willing to pay is going to vary.

For the average site owner I might suggest Godaddy or SiteGround or similar if they can afford around 20 - $25 per month in hosting.
For some folks who will likely not be doing any of their own tech support calls, and they are on a tighter budget with their site, I might suggest a portal like HostGator which has okay hosting for $10 per month or $4 per month if you pay 36 months in advance.

There are many more techy type hosting companies out there, and much more robust hosting options for 'dedicated' and 'colocated' hosting. This is not an exhaustive hosting information page covering all situations.

In more competitive markets I might suggest a VPS hosting system, or a hybrid CDN type of system like Kinsta hosting offers which start around $60 per month.

Once you get above those levels you likely want to have some type of system admin on staff or on retainer that you work with on a regular basis and get to a dedicated hosting solution. That is going to depend on your exact needs and future growth concerns.

If you launch a nationwide ad campaign you may need some quick up-scaling like google and amazon/AWS provide - but that is going to take the right tech help to keep all sorts of problems at bay. The wrong setup with your hosting in a situation like that could have these companies hitting your bank card for ten thousand dollars in a day.

Contact me to discuss what you are looking for and what we can do to help make that appear!