The choice of a hosting provider is an important aspect of a website. In this article, we will discuss the costs of website hosting and how to choose the best hosting provider for your website from a cost perspective. There are numerous hosting providers available, each with their own prices, features, and services.
Click below to go directly to the hosting comparison:
Small websites · Medium-sized websites · Large websites
First, let’s briefly discuss what causes significant differences in costs between hosting providers.
1. Hosting type
There are different types of hosting available, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The four most common types are shared hosting, VPS hosting, Cloud VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting.
The differences mainly lie in the amount of server capacity allocated to your website. With the cheaper options, you share server space with other websites. With the more expensive options, you get your own server with more control.
For allmost any small website, the cheapest option will be sufficient: shared hosting. Only when your website becomes larger and more extensive (and receives tens of thousands of visitors per month) or when you have very specific requirements, the more expensive options become interesting.
Shared hosting is the cheapest option and suitable for small websites. Your website is hosted on the same server as other websites and you share server space, bandwidth, and other resources with other users.
VPS hosting is more expensive than shared hosting, but offers more control and better performance. With VPS hosting, you get more server resources allocated and you will have more technical control over the server.
Cloud VPS hosting is a relatively new variant and slightly more expensive than VPS hosting. Here, your website is hosted on a network of servers instead of a single physical server. This offers more flexibility, scalability, and reliability.
Dedicated hosting is the most expensive and advanced option. You have full control over the server and all server resources are exclusively for your website. This is the best choice for large companies and organizations with heavy websites.
All of these options are also available in managed and unmanaged variants. With the managed variant, the hosting provider handles everything for you, such as updates and security. With the unmanaged variant, you are responsible for everything yourself.
2. Reliability and performance
Reliability and performance are important factors when choosing a hosting service. You want a provider where your website runs smoothly and without interruptions, and with fast loading times.
It is important to look at reviews and ratings of various hosting providers to see how reliable they are and what performance you can expect. All the providers mentioned in this article are reliable and of high quality.
3. Offered features
Some hosting providers offer extra features. Often, you pay more for these. However, there are some features that you should always have, such as:
- Automatic backups
- A database (needed for a WordPress website)
- Email accounts
- Extra security features and spam filters
These features make managing your website easier and more secure. Therefore, don’t just choose the cheapest hosting provider. However, a more expensive provider is not always necessary either: many of the more expensive hosting plans are only useful for large websites. These plans may include extra software or management features for specialists.
4. Customer support
In addition, good customer support is of course important for solving any problems you may encounter while hosting your website. Make sure that the hosting provider has a readily available support team that is available 24/7 for emergencies.
Cheap hosting providers often have limited support. Therefore, choose a hosting provider whose customer service is well appreciated by other users. This will prevent a lot of frustration when your website goes down on a Saturday morning.
Best hosting choice for small websites
- You have a blog, business website, or webshop
- You expect a maximum of 1,000 visitors per day
- Your website consists mainly of text and images
If you have a blog, business website, webshop, or another website project and do not expect thousands of visitors per month, it is usually considered a small website. The difference with a medium-sized website is that medium-sized websites receive a lot more visitors or have special features embedded (such as video streaming or thousands of webshop products).
The best hosting choice for a small website is relatively easy to make. We assume that you have no specific technical requirements and are primarily looking for a reliable, no-nonsense hosting company where you can easily host a website.
In the above recommendation, we have listed Hostinger as a recommended hosting provider.
Hostinger is a perfect option for almost any small website. The options offered are excellent, the ‘value for money’ is better than what competitors offer, and their customer service is also good. It doesn’t matter if your website is targeting the United States, Spain, Pakistan, Singapore, or elsewhere: a website hosted by Hostinger is fast and accessible from any location. For example, we are using Hostinger for years ourselves and never had noticeable problems.
Hostinger offers an excellent price/quality ratio and even its cheapest plans gives you access to:
- Fast SSD storage
- Email accounts
- Capacity for tens of thousands of visitors per month
- Free backups, antivirus, and SSL
- Advanced caching
- 99.98% uptime guarantee
- Automatic WordPress integration
- Money-back guarantee
The more expensive plans offer you even more options for when your website grows. Think of more storage, more server capacity, and for example, a migration service.
Cost comparison for small hosting plans
How do the prices of Hostinger compare to the competition?
It is difficult to compare plans 1-on-1. Each provider emphasizes certain aspects in a plan. One might offer 5GB of storage and 10 email accounts, while another offers 10GB of storage and 7 email accounts. And with some providers, discounts also apply when you purchase a plan for a certain period.
Let’s not make it harder than it is and put a number of comparable low-budget plans side by side. There you will see how the costs of Hostinger turn out very well.
- Hostinger: From $1.99 per month ($3.99 upon renewal)
- SiteGround: From $1.99 per month ($14.99 upon renewal)
- Bluehost: From $2.95 per month ($10.99 upon renewal)
- HostGator: From $5.95 per month ($12.99 upon renewal)
- Dreamhost: From $2.59 per month ($5.99 upon renewal)
Best hosting choice for medium-sized websites
- You have an extensive blog, business website, or webshop
- Your website is relatively heavy and consists of many image-rich pages
- You want to perfectly optimize your website with advanced hosting features
Cheaper hosting for small websites is usually aimed at providing a basic level of hosting services at an affordable price. This means that these hosts usually offer less advanced features and limited resources. If your website grows larger, it is interesting to look into other options.
For medium-sized websites, optimization becomes increasingly important. You will be looking for more disk space, bandwidth, CPU power, and server caching. This makes your website faster and allows you to handle more traffic.
For medium-sized websites, it is important to choose a hosting provider that is affordable but gives you that little extra advantage over budget hosting. Choosing a more comprehensive hosting provider will give you, for example:
- Better processing of large visitor traffic
- Advanced caching techniques for faster loading times
- Higher quality customer support
- Extensive scaling options
In general, more expensive hosting providers offer more advanced features, better performance, more resources, and better customer service than cheaper hosting providers. However, it is important to determine which features are essential for your website and how much you are willing to pay for the best hosting solution.
Kinsta is our choice for a hosting provider with a realistic price to host medium-sized websites. It’s more expensive than the regular hosting providers, but you get a highly-appreciated hosting partner with powerful servers and performance in return.
Cost comparison for medium-sized hosting plans
How do the prices of Kinsta compare to the competition?
Here as well, it is difficult to compare providers one-to-one with each other. There are differences between each plan at every hosting company. In addition, with medium-sized websites, other questions come into play: How good is the customer service? How optimized are the servers? These questions are difficult to express in costs.
We definitely recommend Kinsta for medium-sized WordPress websites because they have a good reputation and powerful servers. However, they are not the cheapest option. If budget is the most important factor for you, you may want to consider Hostinger’s larger plans, for example (or Cloudways if you are tech-savvy).
Although we do not show a direct cost comparison here, we can say that Kinsta has excellent value for money. We also see on Trustpilot and other comparison websites such as Hostadvice or CodeInWp that Kinsta (4.9 out of 5 stars) receives high ratings and is at the top of the comparison list.
Best hosting choice for large websites
- You have a large and heavy corporate website or webshop
- You expect a lot of visitors from all over the world
- You want to optimize your website perfectly with technical hosting features
Best choice for large websites
Go to Cloudways
Get 10% off on all plans with promocode: DESIGNFORWP
For large websites, everything revolves around full optimization and supporting high visitor traffic. Kinsta (our recommendation for medium-sized websites) is known for its excellent performance and good scalability. Therefore, Kinsta is without a doubt also a very good choice for large websites.
However, there is another hosting company that scores just a little bit better: Cloudways. Where Kinsta is somewhat limited in its offerings, Cloudways has virtually no restrictions. This hosting company gives owners of large websites ultimate freedom to host any type of website. Moreover, Cloudways offers extremely fast and scalable server solutions in the cloud.
With Cloudways, you have the choice of many plans that can be customized by adding add-ons. This makes it slightly cheaper than Kinsta. For example, you get a ‘basic version’ of support as standard. If you want to expand this, you can add an advanced ‘Support Add-on’. That means you only pay for it if you choose to do so.
Cloudways is definitely worth trying if you’re looking for a hosting partner for your large website that you want to optimize without spending money on features you don’t use.
Are you looking for more information about Cloudways? There are several good online reviews available with in-depth analysis, such as those from ThemeIsle or Design Bombs.
Conclusion
The costs of website hosting vary greatly by provider. It depends on the type of hosting, reliability and performance, features offered, and available customer support.
The best choice for a hosting provider is to find the right balance between all those factors.
Are you looking for a hosting provider for a small website? We recommend Hostinger. This is an excellent hosting provider with a good price/quality ratio.
For large websites, we recommend Cloudways as a hosting provider: a provider with a flexible offer and great price/quality ratio.