Web hosting is a hot topic if you are going to be starting a website or blog.  There are countless companies out there and it can seem nearly impossible to find the right one without paying a small fortune.  However, you don’t have to spend a lot of money upfront.  In fact, I would encourage that you buy the bare minimum, which is a shared plan.

Shared Hosting

So shared hosting is commonly advertised as unlimited bandwidth, space, and you can use as many resources as you want.  However, while a lot of respectable web hosting companies use this tactic to entice buyers to buy their service.  There is actually a limit and a good rule of thumb is you should be fine with 200-300 unique visitors a day.  This is assuming that you are not running a site with lots of multimedia or videos.

If in doubt and you are thinking of signing up for a web hosting company I would highly suggest that you make a call or contact them live via customer support.  They should be able to tell you the actually number of GB’s they will let you use per month for web hosting.

Another factor that can strongly determine your shared usage is how many plugins or widgets you have installed on a WordPress website.  It’s safe to say that you don’t want to go plugin or widget happy, seeing how there are lots of cool ones out there.  The problem with this is the web hosting provider usually only allows 25 processes on a shared server and lots of plugins will be opening and closing all the time, which could cause errors and require a transfer.

VPS Hosting

VPS hosting is an upgraded version of web hosting.  Shared hosting will have thousands of servers on a website, but a VPS will only have a limited number of websites hosted on one server.  Therefore, your sites are much more stable and commonly load faster.  This isn’t something you typically need if you are just starting out.  However, I would like to note that some VPS services are much more limited in what they will let you do.

For instance, Host A might allow you to use 250 GB per month while Host B will allow you to use 500 GB.  Personally, I would shop around to make sure you’re getting the you most bang for your buck.  Another common thing burstable RAM.  This simply means you are allowed 1-2GB of extra traffic during peek times.  This can be big when sites go viral or you have updates, sales, ect.  Just make sure they can be trusted by doing you research.

When To Switch Shared To VPS Hosting

The age old question when should I switch from shared to VPS is kind of a tricky answer.  For instance, your hosting provider might temporally suspend your account and request that you upgrade your plan because you are using to many resources which is causing other sites on that shared server to run slowly.  Normally, you will start to see error messages when going to your site which state your site is to busy or you will notice it running very slowly.

But, don’t worry because I have created lots of different sites and tested them to make sure they could support lots of daily web traffic.  Like I said earlier 200-300 visits per day should be when you should consider changing to a VPS plan.  But, honestly you are throwing away a lot of money that you could use elsewhere if you start with VPS right out of the gate.

Lastly, VPS usually charges you for cPanel or a script to install WordPress on your site.  Make sure you read the fine print because while yes they usually give it to your for free with shared, VPS will usually charge you a yearly fee.  However, by that time you should be making pretty good money from your site, so you can easily afford the license yearly.