A Padawan's Guide to choosing Hosting Plans

Who is this guide for?​

This guide is for those IMs who aren't complete greenhorns to the world of web hosting and internet infrastructure but do not know how a "tradeoff analysis" for a hosting plan is done.

I assume that you are aware of basic terminology like "hosting plan" and "website migration" and are aware of the differences between the most common types of hosting (shared , vps, dedicated etc. Lemme know if you don't. I may cover it in a seperate post in the future.)

If you have hosted some websites before. But haven't thought much about how to go about it in the future. You might find this helpful.

What is this guide about?​

This guide is about how you can choose a hosting plan right for you.​

Sounds like a pretty trivial problem to warrant a full-blown guide for it, right? Well, apparently it's not.

Web Hosting is a game of tradeoffs. You choose the right tradeoffs depending on your situation, and optimize for the best plan that fits your budget.

Go cheap, and you have a serious bottleneck. Your site can't handle your requirements. And Migration is painful. Your workflow gets slowed down and you risk hurting your business.

Spend way too much on hosting , and you might end up having an overkill box. You waste your money on resources you don't need. Your hosting expenses start cutting into your profits and you risk hurting your business.

This is why optimising for that sweet spot is important. Where you aren't splurging your money

And this is why optimising for just that sweet spot is important. Where you aren't splurging your money on wasted compute, but you aren't cheaping out either and your requirments are met.

When you have chosen a plan optimised for your usecase, you have the chosen the "right" hosting plan for you.

So, How to know if a plan is optimised for you?
Finding out whether some hosting plan is right for you usually involves 3 basic steps:

1. Listing out your minimum hosting requirements.
2. Listing out your hosting plan's features.
3. Figuring out if the plan is just enough to meet your requirements.

Sounds obvious? I will go over why it isn't just in a minute.

Lemme demonstrate how to do all this with an example:

imagine there are two IMs, Mr A and B. Both start with almost equal skillsets; they know how to run and host a wordpress site and tbeh have run a few small sites before that have gotten to a couple thousand visitors per month.

They have similar goals too; both want to create their largest sites ever. Complete authority sites that get a lot of traffic.

Mr A goes the old fashion route. They have worked with shared hosting before so they go with it and start grinding with it. They dont plan ahead for how much traffic they might get in the future and whether they can migrate easily or not.

Mr B does it different. They ask a couple of questions first. Those are:
-> "how much traffic will i get in the next 3/5 years?"

-> "how much bandwidth will i need for the next month. How much bandwidth will i need for a month 3 years down the line"

-> "How much compute (ram/no of cores) will my site need when it becomes an authority and is getting 100-300k visitors a month"

-> "how much storage will i need today vs 3 years down the line and will it be easy to upgrade"

-> "how flexible would it be to migrate"

See what I meant when I said above that this isn't obvious? A list of questions like that show requirements, which , if you don't do the research isn't obvious to get.

Once you have the requirements. You can then proceed to find out what features will your hosting plan need.

Once you have a list of hosting plans, you can compare them and see which one of them best fits your needs.

Remember that: " There are no right choices. Just right tradeoffs."

They are good things mentored. I would recommend testing the host before signing up. If testing is not provided - sign up for 1 month and after that decide if that worth to continue with annual plan.