Hi ALL! I am George Pierce, I have about 20 years of online experience, and this post is about finding the right web host early. I can remember shopping for the "perfect" host, and I thoroughly did my homework. Back then, there were good hosts, and there were bad hosts. Bad hosts...hosting with all kinds of problems, glitches, and downtime. Today, to the best of my knowledge, all web hosts are good regarding performance and with little to no downtime.
There can be a problem, however, which is that you can outgrow your hosting.
In my case, and I believe in most cases, your growth kind of sneaks up in you, Even worse, it can take several years. Over several years, your site probably has a lot of content. And your host lets you know that you have exceeded your storage limit...the amount of space your site is using for its content. Even worse, your host informs you that your site is exceeding bandwidth...why this is worse is that bandwidth is relative to your traffic...the more traffic your site gets, the more bandwidth it uses. The whole idea is to get traffic, the more the better, and suddenly your host informs you that your bandwidth exceeds their limits.
Your are usually faced with two options, a significantly higher hosting cost or moving your site. Moving your site is supposed to be one click easy, it was NOT. It was difficult, so difficult, it was painful.
The solution is to find the right host at the start. This right host should give you virtually unlimited hosting. I use Hostinger which is virtually unlimited hosting, about $3.50 per month, if paid 4 years at a time. I have not used Dream Host, Green Geeks, or A2 Hosting, which is supposed to be comparable with a cost closer to $3 per month.
I am a proponent of starting for free and there is a lot of great free hosting, however, you are going to outgrow your free hosting. When you do, check out some of the lower-cost hosting, it is excellent, and best of all, it can save you HUNDREDS of dollars per month. As you see above, it is easy to use more bandwidth in a day, than many hosts allow for a month, so keep 'unlimited' in mind.
Thank you for reading.
Much success,
George Pierce
PS. Allow me to invite you to visit my YT channel for free make-money online training.
Comments
I am on my fifth year with the same hosting. The only reason my site has disappeared is excessive bandwith usage. One thing you need to know is how is bandwidth measured and by whom. Google tells me I get around 500 visitors a week. The host tells me it is 4 times that. The host decides when you have exceeded your bandwidth, not search engines.
Your host should have Awstats, it will be in your CP (metrics and then visitors) which is what you see above, if not, a free service such as Shiny Stats can give you a reliable visitor count and if your host has Softaculous, there are more options as well as Google Analytics. 2K visitors should not exceed the bandwidth, you can see that 3M in a week does not exceed bandwidth. That is why I made this post, thank you, Dennis.
George it is spikes in visitors after some of the blog posts that take the number over the limit. Unlike most people I do not check the stats as much as I probably should. I do understand that time is my most precious commodity. Finding time to check the stats seems to be one of my downfalls.
What makes the perfect hosting service depends as much on the personality of the user as much as on the quality of the server. With both in tune then all will be well. Your humourous image sums it up perfectly George - YOU have to be in control, make change when needed.
Most businesses are not going to require a lot of storage and bandwidth and as you say, get a good fit, thank you, Tom.