Hosting Companies: 3 Examples to Consider

You could spend the time and effort developing your website and registering a domain name, and no one checks it in the end. This might happen if there is no website hosting company to guarantee that your website will operate as quickly, consistently, and securely as possible.

All businesses seeking to improve their online visibility must first establish a website and have support from any of the hosting companies. The simplest approach to compare pricing plans is to go to the websites of the hosting companies and then explore the services they provide.

3 Hosting Companies to Consider When Deciding on Your Plan

The majority of website hosting companies have many web hosting offers and services they may include in their hosting packages. You may not need some of them, but you’ll require many. Therefore, it’s sometimes cheaper to purchase hosting plans that include all the services you need than to purchase a hosting plan and then add on many plug-ins.

1. Bluehost

Bluehost is the first hosting company we’ll examine. It was founded in 1996. It has been around for a long time and has grown to be the most well-known name among hosting companies, particularly WordPress hosting. Initially, Bluehost provides a wide range of hosting services, and the costs are far more reasonable.

Bluehost is a hosting company that WordPress officially recommends. You won’t ever need to be concerned about your website loading slowly, as there is always Bluehost’s continuous customer support; you can contact them by phone, email, or live chat, even during periods of high traffic.

Before you purchase any plan, check whether the features you need are included in the hosting plan you choose. There are other factors to think about when selecting a hosting plan based on price: what additional features you will receive without charge and which of those features you are planning to use.

Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans

If you visit the website of Bluehost, you will find that there are Shared, Dedicated, Virtual Private Server, and Online Store hosting plans. So, if you look at their Shared hosting plans, you can see that there are up to four distinct plan levels. The key differences between these Shared plans are the quantity of storage and resources you get and the number of websites you may host.

Basic Plan

In the Basic plan, you can host one website, and you can get a free domain for a year. The plan also offers 10 GB SSD storage, custom WordPress themes, and round-the-clock customer assistance. So, you can only attach one website to a single plan, and this might either be a pro or a con, depending on your requirements. If you only have one website, this Basic plan will be perfect for you.

Bluehost offers promotional incentives when you initially purchase a package. The starting price for their most basic plan is $2.95 per month for the first 12 months instead of $11.99. In other words, you’ll pay $2.95 per month for an entire year. After this year, the plan will automatically renew at the standard price, which is $11.99.

Pro Plan

If you have two or more websites, you will need to upgrade to a higher plan, like the Pro plan. The difference between the Basic and Pro plans is mainly in the number of resources you choose. The Pro plan hosts up to five websites. It also offers 100 GB SSD, which is still a very generous amount of storage for the price they are offering. You will pay only $13.95 per month if you choose the 12-month plan.

On top of that, the Pro Plan provides custom WordPress themes, a free domain valid for a year, and a free daily backup for a year. It’s also great that it offers a free SSL, a free CDN, and malware scanning. Frequently offered by web hosting companies, the free CDN and SSL add a degree of security and performance. Additionally, you are only a click away when you need immediate technical support from their team.

Choice Plus Plan

The Choice Plus plan includes all the basic and pro features. You get free domain privacy for a year. The domain privacy feature will protect your information from the Whois database. If someone were to look up the information for your domain, they would only find Bluehost’s general contact details and not yours. Another long-term benefit it has is being shielded from spam and even identity theft.

Like the Pro plan, the free one-year automated backup is something else you can get with the Choice Plus plan. In general, if you ever need to get back to your backup, you will inevitably lose earlier data. So, you are highly advised to get a free automated backup and select one of the hosting companies which provides daily automated backups.

There are workarounds for not having an automated backup option in your hosting plan. If you have a WordPress website and the hosting plan you choose doesn’t support daily backups, you may still get free plug-ins like Updraft, which has free and premium editions. Using it, you can essentially create and preserve your backups every day.

So, there is a difference between having your server do a backup automatically every night and doing it yourself. Depending on the plug-in you use or the specific hosting plan you subscribed to, your backup will be performed manually and saved on Google Drive/computer files or automatically and kept on the hosting servers.

With Updraft, you can manually create a backup yourself or set it up to create backups automatically and send them to Google Drive or other services of a similar nature. You have to pay for that backup because it is a component of their paid version. However, if you can locate a hosting company that includes daily backup in their package, it’ll be great because you’ll have everything in one place rather than separately.

With Choice Plus and Pro plans, you get extras like plug-in collections, performance insights, and staging sites, and you could pay extra for these options. These features could be things you don’t need or exactly what you’re looking for, depending on your level of technical expertise and how involved you want to be with the technical side of your website.

Bluehost Dedicated Hosting Plan

Unlike shared hosting, dedicated hosting is when you have a server of your own for your website, thus having exclusive access to all of the server’s resources. Its only drawback is that you must manage your server on your own.

When it comes to pricing plans, they provide three tiers of dedicated hosting plans: Standard, Enhanced, and Premium. They vary, obviously, depending on the performance requirements you need, including the RAM size, the number of CPU threads, and the dedicated IP addresses.

The billing cycles they provide are for 12-month and 36-month terms, and they provide promotional deals. The Standard Plan costs $109.97 per month for the first year if you choose the 12-month plan instead of $199.99. The Enhanced plan costs $139.99 instead of $269.99 per month for the 12-month plan. However, it will automatically renew at $269.99 after a year. If you choose the Premium plan, you will pay $159.98 per month for the first year instead of $299.99.

The prices include the CPU features, enough RAM, and one free domain. The RAM of the Standard, Enhanced, and Premium Plans are 8 GB, 16 GB, and 30 GB, respectively. Both the storage space and the bandwidth are ample in all the dedicated hosting plans. The Standard, Enhanced, and Premium plans have 1 TB, 2 TB, and 2 TB HDD Storage, respectively. Their bandwidths are unmetered.

2. IONOS

IONOS is one of the hosting companies that offers dedicated web hosting. However, if you cannot manage dedicated hosting by yourself, you can hire external experts who are qualified to handle your server. You will pay an additional fee to maintain your dedicated server.

The websites that IONOS hosts receive excellent performance, speed, and stress ratings. It’s yet another excellent alternative in terms of price. They also offer IONOS Cloud SSD storage as a good alternative to HDD storage, as it is nearly faster and more reliable. It also offers higher performance for workloads with smaller block sizes, including CRM uses, financial transactions, and fast data analysis processing.

IONOS Pricing Plans

IONOS provides capabilities that are quite comparable to those provided by Bluehost. However, they provide less expensive hosting plans than Bluehost. They have three plans:

1. Start: suitable for small websites and blogs,
2. Grow: good for websites with more content, and
3. Boost: great for larger websites with higher traffic demands.

All IONOS hosting plans have an introductory offer of six months at a specific price, after which the price increases. The increase is not significant—generally by $9—but it is still worth considering. Their Start plan costs $3 per month for the first six months and then increases to $6 per month, while their Grow plan costs $1 per month for the first six months then increases to $10 per month. If you choose the Grow plan, you will pay $7 per month for the first six months. Then, you will pay $15 per month.

3. Hostinger

Another popular hosting company is Hostinger. Their plans start at $2.99 and go up to $24.99, making them more enterprise-oriented. The good news is that they provide a lot for each hosting plan. It is also less expensive than Bluehost. However, the renewal plan is a hike from the introductory offer.

Hostinger Pricing Plans

Hostinger has good performance-optimised websites for their price range, even with their shared hosting. The quantity of storage, the amount of bandwidth, and the number of websites you get with each hosting plan make all their prices different.

Hostinger’s most expensive plan is Cloud Startup. This plan costs $8.99 per month instead of $24.99, and you will receive two months for free. If you decide to renew, you will pay $19.99 per month. However, the Business plan costs $3.99 per month, and you will also receive two months for free. For renewal, you will only pay $8.99 per month. The cheapest plan at Hostinger is Premium, which costs $2.99 per month. You will also get two months for free. If you want to renew, you will pay $6.99 per month.

Hosting Plans

Hostinger offers three hosting plans: Premium, Business, and Cloud Startup. Their Premium hosting package comes with unlimited bandwidth and a free domain valid for only one year. You can also get the domain after a year by paying $9.99, and this can be considered an additional cost. This plan enables you to add up to 100 websites, each with 100 GB of SSD storage. It also provides unlimited free SSL certificates to encrypt your websites’ traffic.

SSD storage is where Hostinger diverges the most. With their hosting options, you receive a reasonably sizable quantity of SSD storage, not HDD, so your plan will include quick, high-performance cloud hosting. As a result, you don’t need to be concerned that your website will ever be slow or experience downtime due to a lack of storage space on your server.

Hostinger Backups

There are various extras in Hostinger’s plans that are pleasant to have, one of which is the backup. Saved on Hostinger’s servers, they provide weekly backups for the Premium plan and daily backups for the Business and Cloud Startup plans. The daily backups are highly advised. If you pay for the Premium plan that has a weekly backup, consider adding a free plug-in like Updraft for daily backup to ensure that you always have a functional copy of your website from only a few hours prior.

Free Domain

The free domain is yet another thing Hostinger provide. You may have noticed that many hosting plans provide a domain name for free, though some only for a year. It’s a nice thing to have, and if you haven’t already had a domain name, you should get one because you will need it for your website. You can do this through Hostinger and obtain it for free.

Free Migration

Free migration is another feature that would be wonderful to have but may be optional for you. If your website is already hosted elsewhere, and you want to avoid the hassle of moving it from one server to another or need more technical expertise to do that yourself, Hostinger will take care of it as part of its service. They will move your website, making the process hassle-free for you if you give them all the necessary information. However, if you can move your website alone, it might not be as advantageous for you as it would be for someone who couldn’t.

Uptime Guarantee

A 99.9% uptime guarantee is something Hostinger provides that only some hosting companies do. Since they regard website uptime highly, they ensure that your website has a 99.9% uptime rate. Even their most basic package offers excellent value for the money.

Customer Service

Hostinger offers excellent customer service and support. Each of their plans has a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is great since it gives you a whole month to test out the plan you choose, evaluate how well your website works with this plan, and find out whether you need more or fewer resources. You could also try out their customer service if customer service is a necessary thing you need. You have a whole month to engage in things like how quickly they reply, how helpful their advice is, and how soon they resolve your issue.

Hostinger will return your money within the first 30 days if there is anything you are unhappy with or if you decide website hosting is not for you. Having that advantage is a great asset because some web hosting firms don’t return money at all. Other hosting companies offer extensive money-back guarantees of up to 60 days. However, 30-day guarantees are a great option.

Conclusion

Any website’s success depends on picking the best website hosting plan. In this article, we compared Bluehost, IONOS, and Hostinger. Picking the one that fits your needs depends on whether you are building a new website or seeking to switch from another provider.

The primary advantages of Hostinger are its features and low costs; it is the greatest option for people on a low budget seeking out a bargain. However, Bluehost stands out due to its fantastic WordPress hosting and affordable fees. IONOS, on the other hand, caters to small to medium-sized organisations looking for dependable, user-friendly, and cost-effective web hosting or cloud solutions.