All web hosting plans have different features and offer different levels of resources. How do you select the right plan for you? A shared hosting plan is by far the most popular one as it is affordable and suitable for most websites. With thousands of web hosts competing for your business and endless offers of unlimited bandwidth and disk space, the new or less experienced webmaster is usually be tempted to go with the lowest priced hosting they can find.
You can start with the cheapest plan but usually, this will result in problems - slow page loading, downtime and general poor performance. Often, the cheapest hosting can be unreliable and will have very poor tech support. Purchasing cheap hosting from some web host you have never heard of before also involves some risk. These companies are often here today and gone tomorrow. Also, in order to offer something too good to be true, these businesses have to use cheap hardware and overload their servers with too many accounts in order to bring in enough money. We have all heard horror stories about someone's bad experience with some web hosting companies. So take our advice and spend a little extra, go with a reputable well-established company.
There are many things to consider when choosing the right plan, and this can often be a difficult choice even for experienced webmasters. Let us first consider the three main types of web hosting plans:
Web Hosting:
As the name suggests, shared hosting is a number of hosting accounts located on one server, some of them share the same IP address (although a dedicated IP address is often available for an additional fee). These plans will always offer a specific set of features and will always have resource limits. It is essential to know what features you need for your site and how demanding it can get in terms of resources consumption. If you are not certain, it is absolutely alright to start with a more limited plan and upgrading later after your site grows and gets more traffic. Just be sure that the plan you select offers the features your site requires. Some of the things you may need to consider: disk space, bandwidth, number of hosted domains and, possibly, number of subdomains and parked domains, versions of PHP, MySQL, and Perl. Will you need a dedicated IP address? You may want to allow multiple FTP users or you may need to create a number of email addresses. Will you need MySQL or PostgreSQL databases? If so, how many? These are specifications and limitations that will vary for different shared hosting plans. If you are just starting your first website and are not entirely sure what you need, then you may not need to be too concerned about these details yet - you can always upgrade later. 2Stallions Hosting has several shared hosting plans to choose from – Value, Professional and Ultimate plans. In addition to these, there is a Business SSD plan.
How do I know when I need to upgrade?
It is easy to know when the time comes to upgrade. As your site grows and traffic increases, it is possible that at some point your site may require more resources. With most hosting providers you won't find this out until you start to experience problems with your site. With 2Stallions Hosting you can monitor this yourself thanks to CloudLinux – log into your cPanel and look on the left, below the monthly bandwidth and disk space usage you will see 'CPU Usage' as a percentage and 'Concurrent Connections'. Keep a close watch on the CPU Usage if it frequently starts getting too high. You will also want to watch your disk space and bandwidth, depending on the type of site you have and its content, the requirements for disk space and bandwidth can vary greatly. Another way to know the time to upgrade is when you want something that isn't supported by your current hosting plan. Maybe you want to host a large number of domains under in account, or you have more than one domain that needs a dedicated IP address, or perhaps you need a large number of email addresses, or you want to have streaming media on your site, or you want to use some script that has some special requirements - there are many possible reasons you may need to upgrade.
What do I do when I need to upgrade?
The first thing is to determine what you need and try to some extent to anticipate your future needs. Once you believe you have determined what you need, begin looking at plans that may meet your requirements, carefully examine the specifications of these plans and don't be reluctant to ask questions. Here at 2Stallions Hosting, we can offer recommendations if you like, and we will be happy to answer any questions you may have. Then, once you have decided on a new plan, your next actions depend on the hosting plan you are moving from and the one you are moving to. If you are upgrading your hosting here at 2Stallions Hosting, submit a ticket with our Billing department, we will upgrade your account and assist you with transferring your sites. If you are transferring a hosting account to 2Stallions Hosting, and your hosting provider uses cPanel, we can also assist you with transferring your sites. In this case, don't cancel your other account until your new one is activated and the transfer is complete. For specific information on how to transfer an existing hosting account to us.
