Hosting plans for brands – a definitive guide

Hosting plans are the land of the Internet. And, just as how a land’s purpose varies in the physical world, it varies on the internet too.

Think of it this way, you could purchase a 150sq. yard non-agricultural land and properly utilize it to build a store.

Or you could purchase a 300 sq. yard agricultural land to build a 100 sq. Yards-sized supermarket store and leave the rest untouched. 

But,the best way to optimize the investment is to procure enough land as per the requirement and scale it as per the future need.

Similarly, in the digital space, there are multiple types of hosting plans that you can avail yourself. But, it only depends on your needs. 

If you purchase the most basic shared hosting plan to host an eCommerce website with 10,000 active users, you are most likely to crash your digital space more often than ever.

And, before we dive deep into the how, let’s talk about the types of hosting plans.

What are the types of hosting plans:

Now, from the above example, let’s assume that you are an eCommerce developer who has read our article about What is hosting and how to choose a hosting service provider. 

And, now, you are sure about the hosting provider. But, their plans seem confusing.

So, to make it easier, we’ve easily explained the most important hosting plans for brands based on a scale

For Small & Medium Enterprises:

1. Shared Hosting plan:

Shared hosting is a term that says is a hosting option where your website will share the same server space with multiple other websites. 

Here, the multiple websites hosted on a single server share their RAM (Random Access Memory) and processing power.

It’s the most inexpensive form of hosting and is useful for small brands/startups that are in their initial growth stages and incubation stages to host portfolio/basic websites.

It’s ideal for brands that attract limited traffic

2.WordPress Hosting plan:

TL;DR: WordPress hosting is just a shared hosting plan with easy WordPress installation abilities. 

WordPress hosting or Managed Hosting is a method of WordPress hosting where the shared server has an option to easily integrate WordPress. 

It’s similar to shared hosting in terms of pricing. And, is generally aimed toward a non-technical clientele.

3. Cloud Hosting:

Cloud hosting is a method where multiple computers collaborate over a network to share resources. They divide any application to sub-processes individually computed on multiple computers.

It makes it easier to allocate or assign resources without having to build a large computer infrastructure. Here, the applications use the processing power and RAM of multiple small yet powerful computers shared on a large network.

It is the most common hype in the IT Industry. And, is moderately expensive.

For Large Scale Enterprises:

4. Dedicated Hosting:

It is a type of hosting where your brand/entity is given unrestricted access to the entire server space.

You rent it exclusively for your brand. Any other brand/entity doesn’t share it. And, you gain complete access to the server. 

From the operating system to the security, you can change just as anything. And, your digital spaces get proprietary RAM, processing power, and storage space. It’s recommended for those webmasters who are looking for more control over their digital space.

It is used by medium and large-scale industries that are looking to expand their horizons and test out new digital space applications on their dedicated space. 

And, yes, it is rather expensive.

5. VPS Hosting:

A VPS or a Virtual Private Server is a virtual server created in a shared hosting server. This virtual server acts as a dedicated server. Here, an amount of RAM and the processing power of the main server is allocated to the virtual server. 

And, all the websites hosted within the sub-server can use the RAM and the processing power. In the quite simplest of terms, it’s the monetary flexibility of a shared server and the power of a dedicated server combined together. 

How to choose the perfect hosting plan:

Now, the above filter of your enterprise scale might’ve made it a bit easier. But, we’d want to make it easiest to the core, and here’s how.

1. Understand the Niche:

Now that you know which server works how, we’d recommend you understand the niche. Figure out the audience and hyper-personalized their needs. 

If it’s your eCommerce website, your audience might need fast speeds between internal pages of your website. And, on the back-end, you might need a faster processing speed to cater to all the incoming requests when in need.

For example, when there’s a sale, you’ll attract a lot of consumers. And, you can only cater to all of them if your server is powerful. Thus, you know that shared hosting and WordPress/managed to host aren’t of use.

In this case, we’d recommend going with dedicated hosting or VPS hosting if possible. 

And, if you are a cloud storage provider, you’ll need to focus on providing storage and speed for the consumers to easily upload and download data on and off your site.

2. Future Scope:

Evaluate your consumers’ needs on a 1-year and a 5-year time scale. Means, We’d recommend that you should understand the predicted growth of your consumers’ expectations over time.

And, you could use the predictions to be ahead of time and better serve your consumers. You could upgrade your hosting plan accordingly to serve your consumers better.

And, if you are ever in confusion, feel free to consult us at contact@nexgi.com and we’d be ready to help you out.