How Much Does It Cost To Host A Website?

Starting a business, though online, does require a certain sum of money. And if it makes you happy, if you are not the only person who is wondering how much it costs to host a website and what all nitty-gritty is involved with doing so.

Yet again, it is imperative to understand your website’s hosting costs to help you make an informed decision. 

And in this guide, we will cover everything you need to know regarding the cost of hosting a website. 

Without any further adieu, let us hop right onto it. 

What is a Web Hosting?

In layman’s terms, a website is hosted to reserve a space on the web server to store the files. The more you spend on your web hosting, the more space you get. 

To put it simply, web hosting is a service that lets you create and run a website. 

A web host provides a spade on the server for the user to upload files, install software and perform other web-related activities. Along with that, a web hosting service provider also offers security and website maintenance services. 

Now that you are thorough with what is web hosting, let us learn about why website hosting costs are important and what should you know about it.

Why are Website Hosting Costs Important?

With thousands of website hosting providers available in the market as of now, it surely gets pretty competitive and to stay ahead of the competition, they do offer web hosting services at a very competitive price. 

Along with that, they also offer “special introductory offers” to attract more and more customers. But what happens when these offers expire? Well, you get to face sky-high hosting bills.

The majority of people tend to overlook it and end up locking themselves into long-term contracts without going through the terms and conditions and often tend to regret it all. 

Opting for a web hosting service provider just by looking at their introductory offer can end up increasing your web hosting costs by double or triple. Moreover, you also should look beyond just the price. Loading times, quality, features and a lot more also need to be taken into consideration. 

What Determines The Website Hosting Costs?

There are a lot of factors that need to be taken into consideration when one talks about hosting a website. Some of them are explained below.

1. Type of Web Hosting: 

Multiple kinds of web hosting types are designed for certain specific uses that also affect the price of it. For example, shared hosting is preferred if your website is small or if you are a beginner. A VPS (Virtual Private Server) is preferred when you plan on hosting a large-scale, professional website. 

2. Website Hosting Provider:

There are more than thousands of website hosting service providers available in the market as of now. Make sure that the web hosting provider you pick is reliable and that the services that they provide are worth splurging your money on.

3. Duration of your Plan:

The duration of your plan is also one of the reasons why the monthly pricing of your plan is influenced. Usually, website hosting providers offer great discounts if you opt for their long-term plans. 

4. Features of your Plan:

Every hosting provider offers different kinds of plans depending on the kind of features and the resources you pick. For instance, if you wish to have more storage space, you will have to pay more.

It is very imperative to understand the basics of web hosting as it will help you to break down your costs in a much better manner. With that being said, let us now talk about the different kinds of web hosting types.

Types of Web Hostings:

If we were to talk about a website hosting plan cost, it starts from ₹69 and can go up to ₹25,999 per month. The kind of web hosting you pick will also affect your cost drastically. 

The five main kinds of website hosting types are:

1. Shared Hosting:

Shared hosting is one of the most in-demand types of website hosting, especially for beginners. When you opt for shared web hosting, you will be sharing the server with many other websites. 

Your website will not only be sharing the space with multiple websites but also the bandwidth and processing power.

In case you have a website with low traffic, a static page or a small blog, opting for shared hosting could be your best bet. If you are someone who is just starting, opting for a shared website hosting type could be a great idea as you can test the waters out and then make a decision. 

Eventually, if you feel that the resources on shared web hosting are not working well for you, you can always upgrade. 

2. VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting:

Unlike shared hosting, in Virtual Private Server or VPS hosting, you get a dedicated server. But again, it is a virtual server, not a physical one. 

And like shared hosting, you will be sharing your server with multiple users but not the resources. 

We recommend opting for a VPS hosting service as it enables you to have complete control of your website the server can manage the traffic hike in a better manner and you can also install a root server along with an operating system.

Even though VPS hosting is a bit expensive as compared to shared hosting, you get to relish a better-performing, secure website. 

3. Dedicated Hosting:

When we talk about opting for a dedicated hosting service, you pay for your server. It implies that your website will run quicker, not have a lot of face downtime and have a rather secure website.

If you have an organisation with more than 500 employees, our experts recommend opting for dedicated hosting as there is plenty of data that needs to be taken care of.

And if you plan on running an eCommerce website or a portal that will involve heavy multimedia usage and require a fast speed, dedicated hosting could be the perfect fit for you.

Using a dedicated hosting plan, you can also customise the software and the operating system and establish complete control over the server.

4. Cloud Web Hosting:

Most of us would have thought about iCloud, OneDrive or Dropbox when we read the term cloud. Right?

But what cloud means is a cluster of servers working in synergy so that a web service goes down less frequently. And with this, we can say that cloud hosting is a group of servers working together to keep a website up and running. 

In fact, with cloud-based hosting you do not have to worry about your website going down because this type of web hosting uses multiple servers, so even if one goes down, your website will see no downtime as other servers will be keeping your website up and running.

Our experts recommend opting for cloud-based web hosting as it is rather affordable and comes with amazing features while being secure. 

Opting for cloud web hosting could be a great thing as it is an upgrade from VPS and Shared Hosting.

5. WordPress Hosting:

With around 42.5% of websites using WordPress as their CMS (Content Management System), a lot of website hosting services offer Managed WordPress Hosting.

Managed WordPress Hosting is a web hosting type that was built to help optimise the websites built on WordPress. And depending upon the website host, WordPress hosting can fall under many different websites hosting kinds like Shared WordPress Hosting, VPS WordPress Hosting or Cloud-Based WordPress Hosting.

And in case you are wondering what is the difference between regular hosting and managed WordPress Hosting is, let us help you out. The basic difference is that managed WordPress hosting comes with extra features and might also include pre-installed plugins that help in boosting the performance of your website.

Moving on, let us now take a look at the extra website hosting costs that you need to take into consideration.

Extra Costs Involved With Hosting A Website:

A hosting package surely is one thing that you pay for but along with that, there are a lot of other hidden costs involved when you pay for a website hosting service.

A couple of hidden costs that you must not overlook when you are buying a website hosting package are given below:

1. Domain Name Registration:

When it comes to running a website, you will need a domain name. The domain you pick will also be the web address that you will be putting up in your marketing material, business cards and so on.

Usually, people prefer using a .com as their domain suffix. However, you can also use domain suffixes like .net, .org, and .biz or country-specific domain suffixes like .in.

Domain name registration comes with some extra fees and has a privacy protection feature that helps in safeguarding your name and address hidden from the public WHOIS listing, a web-based database of all of the registered domains.

2. Office 365 or GSuite:

Every business often requires a GSuite or an Office 365 business account and a few web hosting service providers offer these accounts at a reasonable price. 

3. SSL Certificates:

In case you have noticed a green-coloured lock in the URL bar of your browser, it implies that your website has an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is a must for any website, especially one where the user needs to login into the website or if the website deals with financial transactions. 

And if you want your website to rank higher on the search engine, you must use an SSL certificate even if you are simply displaying some pages of information on your website as Google prefers sites that use SSL certificates.

Nowadays, most website hosting providers offer a free SSL certificate with their mid to high-level plans. But again, you need to keep in mind that with enough technical knowledge, you can also get a free SSL certificate through Let’s Encrypt.

4. SiteLock:

A lot of website hosting service providers offer SiteLock for an added layer of security. However, they charge an extra $2 per month for it and some do offer it for free.

SiteLock is a useful addition as it helps in protecting your website with its savvy features like daily malware scans, DDoS attack protection and web application firewalls. 

5. Automated Site Backup and Restoration Service:

Having a backup of your website’s files is important so that you can easily restore your website and have things up and running easily when something goes south.

Hence, your web host server makes sure that you have a copy of your website stored somewhere so that you can restore your website as and when needed quickly and easily. 

While all of the website hosting service providers offer site backup for free, in most cases, they do charge you a small amount to restore your website.

And one more thing that you must keep in mind if you plan on backing up your website on your own is that it does require a bit of technical know-how. 

6. Cost of Migrating From One Host To Other:

There might be a multitude of reasons why you would want to transfer to a different website hosting provider but do you know that it might cost you a bit to make that transfer happen?

However, if you have the required skills and the time to spare for it, you can migrate your website from one hosting to another free of charge. But, if you do not have the time to migrate your website, you can pay your new web host to do it for you.

A basic website migration will cost you anywhere between $150 to $400, depending upon certain factors like the number of files, the host you have picked, the extensions, images on your website and so on.

Well, these were a couple of costs that you would have to incur while getting your hands on a website hosting provider. A bit too overwhelming, right?

If yes, let us guide you towards a better alternative. If you do not wish to go through the hassle of hosting a website and incurring so many costs, we recommend you go forward with Fynd Platform. 

The reason is, Fynd Platform is a self-hosted service provider that helps you in resting your eCommerce website in less than 30 minutes, without requiring any form of coding or advanced technical know-how.

In fact, with Fynd Platform’s impressive features and services, all your eCommerce-related needs are taken care of and you can run a successful business online with Fynd Platform.