Planning

This is by far the cheapest option and the providers claim it’s an easy-to-use solution for hosting websites. We’d agree that there is virtually no technical expertise required but often the setup can be very confusing for people who have never done it before. Shared means that multiple websites are hosted on the same physical server. So hundreds of websites can simultaneously be sharing a finite amount of resources. Since many of the websites will want to use the same CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth, users who opt for Shared Hosting may run into issues with performance. Who gets priority depends very much on the hosting provider and on your plan.

To get an insight into what to expect, we set up our site on the cheapest IONOS Shared Hosting plan to get a feel regarding performance. These are their pricing plans Ionos Shared Hosting Plans. So what do you get for $1/month Well, first of all lots of “offers” regarding enhancing the plan. You can buy advanced security, cloud backups, more storage, automated patch management, disk health monitoring, etc. to make your website better. There is an argument for purchasing some of these enhancements, but many cost more than the original plan. We also had a lot of difficulty accessing our site over the internet because it was registered with Cloudflare which mean the DNS is located with them and thus the Name Servers. This would probably not have been a problem if we moved everything to IONOS, but we had no intention of doing that. On the positive side, their support team went far beyond our expectations for such a cheap plan and were always on hand to help with technical issues. Furthermore the performance was actually quite good, and the editing on the back-end not too slow. Maybe this is because althought the the plan is their cheapest for the first year, it’s actually mid-tier and jumps up to $12/month for the second year onwards. So this would be a wonderful hosting solution for $1/month but way too expensive at $12/month.

We’d like to mention that we would never use Shared Hosting for our websites nor would we recommend anyone else to do so as there are far too many downsides. Having said that, over 30% of websites use Shared Hosting so it’s a popular choice for small businesses, blogs, and personal sites. If you have a small site which does not have much traffic, and you don’t have any great expectations this might actually OK for you – just be careful regarding proprietary pricing teasing you into plans which jump up dramatically after the the discount time elapses (usually on the second year) and be sure all the necessary features like security are included. We would not go so gfar as recommending IONOS, but our overall experience was quite good and they have mainly positive reviews on Trustpilot and other such sites.

VPS is a more expensive option than Shared Hosting. The actual cost depends greatly on the plan but actually some of them are quite cost efficient and not greatly. There is definitely a requirement for some technical expertise in setting up a site on a VPS, but we think this can be overstated. With a bit of research the setup is not greatly complicated and the support from the hosting teams is usually excellent – for more helpful than with Shared Hosting in our opinion. With VPS the physical server is still shared, BUT each user gets a specific set of resources which are linked to the plan. So the CPU, RAM, disk space and bandwidth resources are dedicated. It’s not known exactly how many websites use VPS, but a resonable estimate would be 15%. So it’s a very popular option and is a powerful solution to hosting your site. VPS solutions are also very flexible, so as the site grows and becomes more popular it’s easy to scale up to a plan providing more resources. With the right plan and when optimized correctly, VPS works very well even for high volumes of traffic. We’d recommend it for users who want much better performance than they could expect with Shared Hosting, but who still want to keep within a tight budget. There are numerous other benefits compared with Shared Hosting which we won’t go into here as they are well explained other sites if you do a bit of research.

Once finished with our Shared Hosting testing, we migrated our site to the cheapest Ultahost VPS plan. These are their hosting plans Ultahost_VPS_Plans. As you can see the planse are considerably more expensive than the IONOS Shared Hosting. Prices are cheaper the longer the period you sig up for, but do not increase once the period ends – you can just subscribe again for a new plan at the same price. We often use this provider, so we can recommend them. The performance figures are always good and editing is quite fast although neither are comparable with Cloud Hosting.

It should be mentioned that one of the advantges VPS is that many plans allow the setup of multiple websites. So it’s possible to add sites and to increase resources if needed, thus giving users total control. This is not usually the case with Cloud Hosting where the number of sites allowed is often stated in the plan. Our strategy is usually to set up small sites using VPS and bigger ones using Cloud Hosting. We find this approach very cost effective.

Sometimes the cloud is described as a server or virtual machine hosted by a third-party provider and accessed remotely. This is a simplistic description which could apply to any of the types of hosting discussed here. They all provide the delivery of computing services – such as servers, storage, databases, networking, and software – over the internet, enabling access to resources on demand. However when we are discussing Cloud Hosting, we are talking about a NETWORK of remote servers that enable access to an elastic pool of physical or virtual resources. Because of this distribution across multiple servers resources can be added almost instantly as needs demand and there is no single point of failure. The Cloud Hosting is highly scalable and reliable, and very most importantly the performance is much better than with Shared Hosting or VPS. However because of these benefits it can be far more costly. Having said that, some providers provide very reasonable plans and they often include optimizing and security features which would cost extra with other types of hosting.

We set up our site on the on the cheapest rocket.net Cloud Hosting plan to get a feel regarding performance. These are their hosting plans rocket.net Pricing. As you can see, they are considerably more expensive than either Shared Hosting or VPS Hosting. However, there is a lot included in their plans which usually cost extra with the other types of hosting. The security protection is excellent, so no need for any additional 3rd party cover. The best Web Application Firewalls (WAF) from providers like Sucurri, Malcare, and

Dedicated WordPress hosting is a specialized type of web hosting service that is optimized exclusively for running WordPress websites. It offers a higher performance environment tailored to the unique needs of WordPress, often backed by dedicated resources and expert support, but id far far more expenve than the other types of hosting we have discussed so far. Dedicated WordPress hosting provides users with a server (or a significant portion of one) that’s configured specifically for WordPress. This can either be on a dedicated physical server or a dedicated virtual environment within a cloud infrastructure, depending on the provider.

Key features often include: