You may have decided to take the next step with your business website or blog, go up one more level and take advantage of the advantages offered by a CMS like WordPress.org , so you will need a hosting / hosting adjusted to the needs of your professional Proyect. We can help you.
If you have started to search the web, you will have verified that the offer of hostings is overwhelming and the difference in prices between them is surprising. This price difference covers many aspects: from storage capacity (something that you should take into account if your website has more than 50,000 visits per month and you upload many images), to the technical support they offer you (when it comes to a store online speed to solve an incident is essential), are some of the factors that we must consider before hiring a web hosting plan.
Cheap hosting yes, but not only for the price
Before we start, I want to make this very clear.
When I talk about cheap hosting, I don’t just mean the price , but its price / features ratio, and always with a minimum of quality . Because if I were to focus only on price, you might end up hiring shitty hosting, which is exactly what happened to me a few years ago.
Do you know how I did it? Let’s see if this sounds like you:
I googled “the cheapest hosting”.
I clicked on the first result of all, a site that was also called cheaper impossible (what could go wrong !?).
And of all the packages that this site had, which one did I hire? The cheapest of all .
Before starting…
One thing must be made clear. It is easy to find many hosting and very cheap, but the difficult thing is to test and compare them to see if they really are of quality (each hosting is a bloody world!).
So to make the comparison easier (because if not, it would be infumable), I am going to explain some things to keep in mind:
How much does website hosting cost? There are numerous hosting types and multi-layered pricing plans available on the market.
Shared hosting, the most inexpensive type, ranges from about £2 to £12 per month, while dedicated hosting plans can range from £60 to upwards of £400 per month.
There are different pricing tiers based on various factors such as bandwidth, storage space, and extra services.
Generally speaking, the larger and more complex your website, the more bandwidth and storage space you need – and the more you’ll need to spend.
If you’re looking for an affordable web hosting plan, you don’t need to worry as we’ve tested and ranked the most popular providers out there. Read on to find out the best cheap web hosting services currently available in the market.
I am looking for the cheapest pack (up to a maximum range of £ 800 / year without VAT) and basic in which WordPress can be installed . This is how I made it known to all the hosting providers I contacted.
I focus mainly on hosting that is, if possible, simple to configure (usually shared hosting ). Yes, there are VPS hosting that is also very cheap like OVH’s, but you have to manage them yourself and not everyone knows how to do it …
They will all have their own .com domain so you can see and test them yourself. 🙂
All will be tested with an SSL certificate installed (HTTPS), because at this point it is essential to have it. Be careful, those who do not have it for free, at the price I add that of the SSL certificate, because it better adjusts to the reality of what you would spend in total.
What to look for before buying cheap web hosting?
Whether your website is a personal project or a professional and demanding website, the web hosting you choose will have to meet some basic requirements. In my opinion, these are the essential functions:
Server availability :
If your hosting is constantly down, your website will be too. Your visitors (and Google) will be unable to see your page, I can’t think of a faster and more absurd way to lose traffic (and web positioning).
The support :
If you have been in the world of web creation for more than 5 minutes, you will already know that things can go bad or worse: posts that disappear or pages that do not load due to DNS problems. Therefore, a hosting that is quick to solve problems is essential and if it offers 24-hour support much better.
Speed :
Have you ever stared at a gawking car saying “Woow how slow it goes”. Well, with the same websites, nobody likes slow sites, in fact we despair! And they are also bad for SEO .
Comparison of hosting to host your website
I have compiled information from several hosts with different price plans, offers, promotions and benefits so that you can, at a glance, get an idea of what they offer.
The variety of each other, in some cases, is impressive, so I am going to focus on plans that offer at least: 1 GB of disk storage and that have several databases.
Although also, before deciding on a specific hosting, I recommend that you investigate their respective websites and look at least that they meet these other requirements:
- Ease and speed to update content.
- Different hosting plans to be able to migrate if necessary. There are usually differences in: storage , data transfer and number of available domains .
- Unlimited email (number of email accounts with your domain. For example name@aulacm.com).
- Spam filters (essential).
- User-friendly and intuitive interface ( cpanel ).
- Quality technical support , if possible 24 hours a day / 7 days a week / 365 days a year.
- Have forums, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), video tutorials, etc. Many of our doubts can be resolved by doing a search on the hosting website.
- Backup automatic and programmable.
What is hosting?
Little mystery: hosting is a service through which any person or entity publishes its website on the network of networks , with its corresponding pages. The companies that provide it – our hosts on the Internet, we could say – provide everything they need so that others can access our online content in all its splendor.
Such content is “hosted” on computers specifically configured for this purpose: they are called servers. Internet users who want to visit our website enter the name of this (the domain) in their address bar and, hocus pocus, the magic of the internet transports them intact.
What types of hosting services are there?
- Shared Hosting
It is a type of hosting in which, to put it bluntly, our website shares a floor with other websites. Well, not floor, but server. And be careful , physical space and the software with which it operates is shared . This results in lower cost to us – which is the main reason for sharing whatever – at the risk of stumbling onto other naked websites in the server corridor when they get out of the shower. There are other downsides, such as slowing down, but the hallway thing is almost the worst.
2.Hosting in virtual private servers, or VPS
If before we talked about sharing a flat, the simile for hosting on virtual private servers (in English, VPS) is an emancipation with more autonomy: in VPS a physical server is shared, but with the advantage that there will be no other content than ours in the virtual compartment that we occupy. In other words, we rent an apartment — small, yes, but very cute — in a block of flats. Instead of housemates , what we now have are neighbors. The result: our own operating system —the equivalent of having the sofa in the living room just for you—, exclusive storage, a CPU that is the cane, bulk RAM and bandwidth as broad as Castilla, that is: without limits.
3.Dedicated Hosting
With dedicated hosting we can finalize the simile of the tenant, which is about time. What is the story now? We have progressed in life: finally, we have passed the exams to janitor, or a friend of Dad has plugged us into his company. What does it translate into? Pasta, my friend, lots of money — enough to pay our own server’s rent. It’s like we’ve rented a penthouse in Beverly Hills for our website, which now goes like a shot. If our pages consume what is not written in terms of resources, or if security is a pressing need, dedicated hosting is the answer.
Of course, think about the pension plan.
What are the characteristics of a hosting plan?
Bandwidth
It is a simple concept. If we speak of networks as “information highways”, bandwidth is the virtual analog of the number of lanes: the greater that width, the greater the traffic of Internet users who visit our content on the network. Depending on the price of our subscription, we will obtain a higher or lower maximum value for our bandwidth.
Disc space
We constantly talk about uploading content to the network or the cloud, which can sometimes make us forget that, despite the fact that we move in a virtual and infinite space, our websites will use files with weight (in kilobytes), measured and number. For this reason, hosting providers assign us a certain space on their servers to store our electronic correspondence, the files of our web pages, or those annoying databases, more difficult to locate than a Chinese vase.
Since companies charge us more or less proportionally to the space we occupy on their servers, it does not hurt to sit down and do accounts to have an estimate of our needs in this section.
Here it is important to mention a specific and well established technology: solid state drives – the well-known SSD. Traditional hard drives are a collection of moving parts with a tendency to slower performance and a higher risk of data loss. SSDs, on the other hand, operate in comparison at stratospheric speeds and with greater stability.
If our website is dynamic, the use of SSD in our hosting server falls practically out of the box; However, we should not take it for granted that all companies include it in their service: on the contrary, it is up to us to make sure of this last point.
SSL certificate
The server-client binomial establishes network connections susceptible, like any other connection, to being hacked by third parties with dark intentions. To protect them from unwanted snoopers, a technology called SSL was developed: the so-called “secure socket layer”, which guarantees the encryption of connections and preserves the confidentiality of the information exchanged.
Actually, there is little new in the use of this technology; It has long been the internet standard for all secure transactions. Or is it that you have never noticed that “https: //” that precedes most addresses in your browser? Ah, what not? Well, this is how an interaction through SSL begins, alma de pitcher. Ultimately, what interests us in this entire dissertation is the following: the SSL certificate is synonymous with reliability, and our potential clients will be much more reluctant to use our website if we do not have this technology.
Domain
Once we have set up our e-commerce beach bar, our web page on how to become vegan or our blog of Dada poetry, the question is always the same: “Now what do I call it?” Here the domains enter the scene, which play the double role of denominators and addresses in the network.
Computers use so-called IP addresses, which are strings of figures. They are hardly memorizable combinations: beyond things like endearing alphanumeric codes, like RD2D2 and C3PO, good luck for a user to learn that your website is called 198.236.450.3 —and look, it’s a nice number. Domain names replace these numeric identifiers with something more functional.
It is up to us to decide which alphanumeric concoction we are going to choose as a domain name, which can also be combined with the famous extensions such as .com, .org and all the available string. In any case, we will never be exempt from going through the registry to record our choice. This ensures, among other things, that all domain names are different: no two are identical. Whenever someone types www.frutaspacomolamazo.com in their browser, they will end up visiting the website of Paco’s fruit shop.
Availability
If there is a concept as crucial as – often – misleading, it is that of availability. In principle, it is simple: availability is the time that a website remains accessible to the public on the network. However, it is easy for providers to be tempted to promise us “gold and moor” in the form of infallible availability — when 100% availability is, in reality and for technical reasons, unattainable.
Let’s think about something very close to 100%: for example, 99.99%. It would seem an invaluable difference, but the truth is that, throughout a year, our hosting provider will enjoy, in the second case, a margin of more than 50 minutes of disconnection.
Those 50 minutes will cover maintenance shutdowns and possible contingencies: from equipment or software failures, to a natural disaster that cuts off the power supply for a long time — or, simply, the very success of a website that becomes viral at a certain time, crashing the servers.
However, without a hosting business advertising with virtually absolute availabilities, you are shooting yourself in the foot in terms of the time you will have at your disposal for repair or maintenance work. It is no secret that the networks will sooner or later go down, for reasons of all kinds – and, in those cases, our content will not be accessible.
For all of the above, we advise taking a closer look at such announcements, which must be backed by an infrastructure that lives up to what is promised: different redundant server networks with multiple geographic ranges, reflex technology, humidity and temperature control systems. air, storage matrices, and a long etcetera. And, even in these cases, we advise to be wary of offers that promise absolute availability.
Loading speed
Quite simply, the length of the upload intervals for all the elements of our online content. We do not tell you anything that you do not already know when we say that a slow loading process can fill the patience of our visitors or potential customers – much earlier, even, than we can imagine. Life is too precious to waste in front of a recalcitrant screen in its hesitation.
The loading speed is also synonymous with better performance in other respects as well. Internet users will pay more attention and will be more susceptible to our content, improving the performance of our website in terms of monetary conversion of visitor traffic, in addition to offering a better user experience. Even more: if we want search engine algorithms to place us higher in the list of results, loading speed has become a factor – something that has not gone unnoticed by all web developers.
What is a domain name server (DNS)?
In an age when we can barely remember a phone number, IP addresses could never constitute a human-friendly naming system – hence domain names. Our computer will be in charge of translating the information provided by the DNS – in the form of a URL – into a recognizable and accessible IP through the network.
The process is simple: when we enter something like www.dominio.es in the address bar, a DNS server will communicate to our browser the IP that corresponds to it on the server where it is hosted. Actually, it works like a table of equivalences or a telephone directory, in a process where the user rarely intervenes, oblivious to all this bustle of numbers and letters that occurs behind the scenes. It is the magic of the internet.
Which web server is better: Linux or Windows?
Two ways to reach the same result. Opting for Windows or Linux is, to a large extent, a personal choice, since at the operational level they offer very similar things. However, they differ in terms of price (Linux is free, while Windows involves an outlay of varying amounts), complexity of use, adaptability, or their operational resilience.
Linux : Do we use things like PHP, Perl, Python, or other Unix-based languages? Linux will handle it all without a hesitation. Support for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases is the norm, not the exception.
Windows : It is a truism, but Windows works like a silk if we use other technologies from… exactly: Windows. Things like ASP or .NET scripts indicate the use of this operating system , which offers support for Microsoft SQL Server or applications like Access.
standing with those of other providers tested.
Conclusions about web hosting
Although at first it may seem that all hosting offers similar services, the truth is that in support and backup issues it is important to pay attention.
It is also interesting that if you are reaching a traffic of more than 50,000 visits / month on your website, and you are happy with the hosting, you have chosen a storage that offers you different plans focused on your needs. It is not the same to hire a basic plan (generally designed to host a single website), than to hire spaces to provide service to many websites or to several of your clients. Ideally, where you hire your hosting, it can offer you a Premium plan focused on more extensive traffic, and in which you can host more than one website when you need it.
