If you have a simple, low-traffic site, you don’t need to worry much about this because even cheap hosting with minimal resources has enough power to run your site.
In these cases, you can keep costs down by using shared hosting. If all you do is check your email, there’s no reason to pay for a Macbook Pro!
However, for high-traffic sites and/or more dynamic sites (e.g., an eCommerce store or an online course), you’ll want more resources, which will necessitate a higher price. Typically, these types of sites will do better with cloud hosting, either directly or via managed WordPress hosting.
Features
All web hosts offer the computing resources that you need to host a website at a basic level.
However, many hosts go further and build in features and tools to help you manage your website. Here are some examples of what these features and tools can be:
- User-friendly hosting dashboards to help you manage everything without code.
- Automatic daily backups and external storage to keep your site’s data safe.
- Email hosting to create your own custom email address (though you can also purchase separate email hosting, such as using Google Workspace).
- Staging sites to safely test changes to your website.
- Proactive and reactive security features to stop threats before they happen and detect anything that makes it through.
For some examples of the very barebones approach, you can look at cloud VPS providers like DigitalOcean and Vultr. These hosts literally just offer the computing resources, which makes them very cheap for the resources and performance that you get.
On the other hand, a managed WordPress host like Kinsta will charge a lot more for the same performance. But for your money, you get tons of features to simplify things and make your life easier. You also get premium support, which brings us to the next point…
Support
Just as with features, you’ll also see varying levels of support between different hosting services.
Some web hosts offer very barebones support, where literally all they’ll help you with is the server itself.
Other hosts, such as managed WordPress hosts, offer more “application-level” support. This means they’ll help you with not just the server, but also the software that you install on that server (e.g., WordPress).
Offering this extra level of support costs hosts a lot of money, so they’ll charge higher prices as a result. However, if you’re not a very technical person, you might find this to be a good investment because you’ll be able to reach out to support whenever you hit an issue with your website.
First-year promotional prices vs renewal prices
This last detail that can affect how much does it cost to host a website mainly applies to cheap shared hosting providers.
In the budget WordPress hosting space, it’s very common for cheap hosts to offer rock-bottom “promotional” prices
[…]
This article was written by Colin Newcomer and originally published on CodeinWP.