A lot of times, you might have seen that several startups can’t withstand continuously growing online competition because they make the crucial mistake of selecting a web hosting service provider simply based on “Price,” only to be hit with frequent downtimes, lower performance, and support that fails to keep up under pressure situations.
A website is a key element of your online business; it is necessary to consider all the aspects before investing in web hosting for startups. It will considerably affect the success or failure of your start-up.
Furthermore, the web hosting startup market is filled with countless, well-established providers; how can you tell which provider is genuine and which are just all talk?
Don’t expect that all hosting for startups is equal; there’s no one-size-fits-all solution! Every startup’s needs are different. Through this blog, we’ll help you get straight to the point and help you find out the best hosting for startups after examining essential components. We will also compare critical features and give expert advice to ensure your website’s long-term success.
Table Of Content
Understanding Web Hosting
Basically, web hosting is a type of service that enables businesses and organizations to bring their website live on the internet so that people can easily access it. To make this possible, web hosts save your website files on the physical or virtual servers so people can reach your website anytime, anywhere.
To put it simply, web hosting companies offer internet hosting services that let you keep websites online for yourself, your clients, and more. Usually, a web hosting company will have multiple physical or virtual servers where a site can be hosted. A web hosting company also has a co-location for its servers, domain name system configuration, and a web server. Their colocation hosting allow businesses to rent space in a data center to store their servers and other computing hardware.
For each website hosted on the server, the server should have enough space to store all the files relevant to the website. It should also have features and options for site-specific configuration. There should be software like a control panel with credentials so that you can access it and create, configure, and modify your startup website.
What kind of web hosting server you choose depends greatly on the type of website you have. An ecommerce website’s requirements from a web hosting company will be very different from a freelancer’s. Let’s look at the significant kinds of web hosting capabilities available in the marketplace and see which would be best for your startup website.
Types of Hosting Services
You’ve got multiple web hosting options to choose from. Pick one from the following options that meets your needs and gives you a great start.
- Shared Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
- Managed Cloud Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
– Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is a common choice for beginners, startups, small businesses, portfolios, or personal blogs because of its user-friendliness and affordable cost.
A standard shared hosting setup consists of a physical server where your website lives, along with several other websites. It is analogous to renting an apartment in a building and sharing the resources like water, electricity, and space with other tenants, which considerably lowers the operational cost.
Affordability, user-friendliness, no maintenance, and easy scaling are some of the primary benefits of selecting shared hosting services for startups. But you also need to consider a few things such as limited server resources, less control, and security challenges.
Valuable Tip: Start your online journey by purchasing a shared plan, and once your website starts to grow or your website outgrows basic server resources, you can scale up to VPS or dedicated hosting with minimum downtime.
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– VPS Hosting
VPS hosting shares some similarities with shared hosting, except the number of websites you will be sharing the server with will be smaller.
VPS stands for “Virtual Private Server.” A central server is split into many virtual servers for individual websites. If you compare it with shared hosting, it has more resources, so the website performance isn’t as bad as in shared hosting. VPS hosting charges are cheaper than some of the more advanced options like dedicated server, but it is more flexible than shared web hosting.
That said, even though VPS hosting offers several benefits, it does have a few drawbacks. VPS plans are expensive compared to shared hosting, which is why they might not be the best choice for startups, bloggers, or portfolios with limited budgets. Also, to manage a VPS server, you need to have technical knowledge of server configuration, software updates, and fixing security flaws, specifically if it is an unmanaged server.
And while you might think you can migrate your website to another hosting provider, it’s quite the hassle to ensure a safe transfer without the site breaking or going offline. But, after carefully researching, you can find a reliable web hosting company like MilesWeb, which provides free automatic website migration services to flawlessly transfer your website from another web host without disturbing website operations.
– Dedicated Hosting
As the name suggests, dedicated hosting is when you have a dedicated server that belongs to you. This means better uptime and faster speeds. Dedicated hosting with durability and great speed, you have full control and complete technical control of the settings and configuration.
That said, this is the most expensive web hosting type out there, so it’s not the most realistic option for startups. Dedicated server is usually appropriate for resource intensive or enterprise grade websites that are looking for complete control over the server, greater performance, or compliance with stringent security protocols.
– Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is cost-effective and comes with multiple remote servers. Every server has a different function. If one particular server has a problem, the rest of the servers on the cloud network will make up for it, so your website is never affected by a server-level issue.
Most people are now choosing cloud hosting for this very reason. With a huge cloud network, your website will have a much higher uptime and high-speed performance.
Another factor that sets it apart is scalability. With other types of web hosting, you often have to estimate the monthly visits you expect on your website, and your estimates could easily be off the mark. For this reason, there are high chances that when you choose a server, you will either waste resources by not utilizing them fully or be short on them. However, you can scale resources as and when needed on your dashboard with a good cloud hosting company.
The major issue people face with high-performing cloud hosting is that they might not be technical enough to oversee everything on the server side. After all, you’re running a startup, and your time is precious – you want to focus on bringing in business, not ensuring that the server is running smoothly. That’s where managed cloud hosting comes in.
– Managed Cloud Hosting
Managed cloud hosting is the same as cloud hosting, except the hosting service provider fully manages it. This way, you can remain focused on your business. While this may be priced a bit higher than cloud hosting, it’s the most cost-effective measure in the long run. After all, you’re not spending on a technical resource to handle web hosting or wasting time on it yourself. With managed hosting, you can dedicate all your focus to growing your business.
Managed web hosting companies usually have many features and benefits that boost your site’s performance, speed, and security.
– Reseller Hosting
If you’re a technically skilled person, like a web designer or developer, or run a small agency and want to turn your skills into a side hustle or a full-time venture, like starting a web hosting business, then reseller hosting is the best choice. It offers a 100% white label, low investment, high potential, and affordable way to launch a business. Purchase hosting resources in bulk from a web hosting company, repackage them, and resell them to your own clients under your company name. Here, you don’t need to invest in any hardware infrastructure.
You can efficiently manage your multiple client accounts through a powerful control panel, set your own pricing, and develop hosting plans as you wish.
How to Choose a Web Hosting Provider for a Startup?
Here are a few important things to keep in mind before selecting a web hosting provider:
– Uptime
Website uptime is a measure of your website’s availability and accessibility to users. You can calculate your website’s uptime as a ratio of the time your website is available divided by the total time. Select a web host that guarantees 99.9% or more uptime.
Otherwise, unfortunately, you will be missing out on your potential buyers and all the opportunities integral to your startup business.
– Security
According to Accenture’s cybercrime study, about 43% of cyber attacks target small businesses. So how can you improve the overall safety and security of your startup’s website?
Well, one of the things to do is look for a web hosting company that offers strong security features. These can include firewalls, database security to protect your customer’s information, login security, SSL certificates, malicious bot protection, suspicious device login control, two-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, and more.
Your web hosting company should even conduct regular backups to minimize any potential downtime.
– Speed
Most visitors are likely to leave your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This means your website should load super fast to capture relevant leads.
Not only this, but your website speed has a significant impact on your website’s ranking on Google. The higher your website’s loading speed is, the higher you will rank on Google and receive more impressions.
Find a web hosting company that offers a whole stack of the best server software. According to latest study, the ideal response time or a Time to First Byte (TTFB) recommended by Google is 100 milliseconds or less for achieving the best website performance.
– Scalability and Disk Space
Your startup will grow one day. When that happens, your website should evolve too. Here is where scalability and the size of the disk space come in.
Look for the best web hosting provider that supports flexible resource scaling to fulfill your changing demands. As for disk space, it should depend on how big your startup website will be initially, and your expectations for its growth over the years.
A good web hosting company will have experts and support available to answer all your questions regarding scalability. It will make it super easy for you to scale your website over the years.
– User Interface
Ease of management is the best thing a web hosting company can provide you. Startups need to pay more attention to business than to managing tools and apps or figuring out cPanel and the dashboard of your web hosting company.
We recommend choosing managed hosting that provides an easy-to-use platform or interface. This will ensure all hosting hassles are taken care of, and you are focused on your business matters instead of managing your hosting on your own.
– Support
Don’t waste any time figuring out website and hosting problems whenever something goes wrong. Time is money, and if you are paying a web hosting company, you should be able to seek help with hosting and website issues from their support team.
Make sure you look for seamless 24/7 support via live chat and phone. Remember to check reviews on websites like Trustpilot to read what customers say about their support.
Managing any website needs a whole team and your startup hosting company should act as an extension of your team especially when you face server-side issues.
Which Is the Best Hosting Option for Your Website?
When you choose a hosting provider for your startup website, remember that your decision will impact your website’s speed, performance, scalability, and security.
Firstly, choose the type of web hosting you want to look for. This depends on the amount of monthly traffic you expect and the estimated size of your website. It also depends on if you wish to manage the server-side issues yourself or if you want your managed hosting company to do it for you.
If your startup website is small and you expect 1000 monthly visitors, your hosting needs would be different from when you have a website with 100,000 monthly visits. Your startup will eventually grow, so choose the easiest hosting solution to scale.
Make sure you go for a cost-effective web hosting solution so you are not overpaying for unused resources or falling short on resources when you need more. Find a web hosting company that only has you pay for the resources that you use.
I have tried to explain everything regarding web hosting in this article so you can make a fully informed choice.
Selecting the best web hosting for startups is a key step in creating a thriving online presence for your startup. By thoroughly considering your choices and taking into account the above factors, you can make a well-informed choice that fosters the growth of your startup business and provides a smooth experience for your users.
FAQs
1. What factors are crucial when choosing the best web hosting for startups?
Flexibility, performance, ease of use, cost, security, and customer support are some of the most crucial factors to consider when selecting the best hosting for startups.
2. What are the essential features of a hosting plan that a startup needs?
A startup business requires several important resources to manage its website, such as guaranteed uptime, flexibility, a high level of security, ample storage space, unmetered bandwidth, faster page load speeds, 24/7/365 customer support, and user-friendly hosting account managing tools such as cPanel.
3. What are the benefits of choosing managed web hosting for startups?
Managed web hosting for startups provides professional support, advanced security, automated updates, improved performance, and much more. So that you can dedicate your time towards growing your business without stressing about server technicalities.
4. How to assess the best startup hosting before making a purchase?
Before making a purchase, assess the best startup hosting based on a variety of factors such as reliability, flexibility, speed, tech support, safety measures, and cost. Also, go through customer reviews and SLAs for uptime guarantees, and check whether you get easy scalability options to meet your needs when your business starts to grow.
