Hosting for me is as important as electricity. Ok, so maybe not as important as that but it’s pretty damn important I will tell you. Hosting is basically where your website will live. Call it some rental space on the magical internet if you want to.
You will have to pay the hosts a fee for them to look after your wonderful website for you. This can vary depending on a couple of things usually.
Typically the following:
1 – The size of your website.
2 – The amount of traffic (visitors) your website will get.
And usually, I tell my clients that when you are starting out both probably won’t matter at the beginning as your site will start off small and so will the number of visitors.
The good news is that if both or one of the metrics increases beyond the current hosting capabilities you can always change it.
I have had to do this a couple of times with some of my hosts, one occasion was way better and smoother than the other. More on this soon.
So to recap. Once you have your domain (the name of your site) and someone has built it for you (hopefully me) you will need to find somewhere for it to live.
My recommendation is Siteground. Packages start from as little as £2.75 a month and with this, you get a ton of great services on top not forgetting the superb support lines.
Why Should You Choose Siteground As Your Hosting Choice?
Remember I talked about what happens when your sites grow and your current package is no longer suitable? Think of this as a young family starting out for the first time. They just bought their first flat, then little Tommy arrives on the scene and soon baby Jessica makes an appearance soon after that. Well, guess what? They have outgrown their small flat and need to move to a bigger property.
This is a lot like hosting. Sometimes a website will only get small amounts of traffic (and this is fine by the way) and you may never need to move. But if you do or what if one article you write goes viral on Facebook and tens of thousands or even more come flooding to your site?! Most likely on a small hosting package, your site would crash and you would lose all that exposure and business!
Siteground allows you to change hosting very quickly and even with some packages allow you to change the amount of “space” you need from month to month.
Back in January 2015 one of my sites was bringing in a steady income of around $500 a day. This site was hosted on Hostgator. Unfortunately, the package I was on could not handle the traffic numbers and subsequently, the site went down!
After numerous calls and tickets raised to the support staff I was told there was nothing I could do except an upgrade to the top servers at $180 a month!
You will see here that the site was averaging around 10,000 visits per day. And you can also see the point of the crash! Quite a costly one at that as you can see in the graph plot below.
Anyway, the point I am making here is some hosts will not try to keep your site up if you get a spike in traffic whereas others will. Siteground now just up the capacity of the servers and I pay an extra £5 or £10 a month ONLY if I use it. And the main thing is the site is live 100% of the time!
What Are Your Hosting Choices From Me?
Well, first and foremost you are welcome to go out and do your own research and choose whoever you wish yourselves. As long as you can provide me with the details after your site is built this is fine.
Another option is to go ahead and sign up with your own Siteground account here right now. You can be done in a few minutes even if you don’t have a website yet.
The third option is you can let me host your site for you on my Siteground account. Contact me here if you wish to discuss this option.