Creating a blog is quite an entertaining action, which is no less interesting than the creative works that we publish on it, such as short stories, travelogues, humorous feuilletons, poetry, photographs, drawings, comics, social or political cartoons, etc. It might be an especially nice activity nowadays when creating a blog website doesn’t require any knowledge of coding languages. All it takes to create a refined blog page that looks flashy and classy is using a site builder and another more tedious task: choosing a decent hosting company. Nothing else. Yes, it is just that easy!
Choosing a cheap shared hosting plan is much more tedious as we have to choose the best type of plan for us (shared, dedicated, or VPS) literally among hundreds of offers out there. But you don’t have to worry at all. In this blog article, we will try to explain why you should choose exactly a shared web hosting plan and what you should look out for when choosing a provider.
Why Cheap Shared Hosting?
Each website needs server space where its content and data are sheltered. The different types of hosting services depend on the type of server space being used:
- Shared web hosting: With this type of hosting, your blog website shares common server space with many other websites. This is the cheapest option and the best possible for any newbie blog. It provides satisfactory beneficial comfort for any blogger whose traffic is somewhere between low and medium. Once your website starts gaining more popularity, you can easily jump to one of the other types of hosting plans that could allow more traffic to your blog.
- Virtual private server (VPS) hosting: This is the perfect server type for websites with medium to high traffic. It differs from the shared server in one main thing: each user has their own virtual boundaries that shape their own virtual server space. This server space is yours only and it could never be violated. Yet, this type of hosting is much more expensive than a shared type of plan. This is the reason why it is not appropriate for blogs that are just beginning their development and growth. But in case your traffic significantly increases over time, then upgrading to a VPS plan could be among the next immutable steps in the development of your blog.
- Dedicated web hosting: As a single server is used by only one website, this type of plan is very expensive and appropriate for sites with constantly high global traffic, such as YouTube, CNN.com, Weather.com, etc. It is the least adequate for blog websites.
For a blog just starting out, we strongly recommend you choose a cheap shared hosting plan. The reasons for this are two very simple facts: it is quite enough to provide a great hosting service for any newbie blog site, and its price is the most favorable among all other types of server services.
The only reason some very popular bloggers jump from a shared up to a VPS plan is that with shared plans sites can have trouble handling high traffic from time to time. This could most often happen when one of the websites on the server receives extremely high traffic for a period of time, such as an hour or two. But this happens really very rare, and it is not a reasonable motive to choose a more upgraded hosting type of plan for your blog at the very beginning.
What to Look for When Choosing a Cheap web Hosting Plan?
As we already mentioned above, choosing a good cheap web hosting plan could be a little tedious due to the huge variety of hosting companies. But there is one more thing that should be considered, actually. The fact that each host includes different options in their cheap hosting plans might make a choice a little bit more difficult. But we are here to help you with this.
For any blogger who is currently trying to choose a decent hosting plan, we would like to offer the following advice: never pay for options you won’t use, nor for plans that don’t include what you really need. Here are the things that we think every budding blogger needs and must not compromise on when choosing a hosting plan:
- 24/7 customer support: It is very important to be able to count on invariable support from your host as a server problem can occur at any time of the day or night. It would be particularly unpleasant if such a problem occurred on a Friday evening and could not be fixed earlier than Monday. If something like this happens to you, your blogs will not be available for more than 48 hours. That is why the choice of a cheap web hosting plan with 24/7 backing by phone, email, live chat, or ticket system is not to be underestimated at all.
- Backups: Many hosting providers do regular backups of your website data for an extra charge, but the decent ones offer this feature for free as they realize how important it is. In case of a hacker attack, the site can literally disappear. But with a backup, any website can be restored easily and quickly. Therefore, it is logical that making backup copies is necessary for the site owner (who would always like to recover their site in case it was deleted from the server) and for the provider himself (who would lose a client in case a site disappears forever). That’s why we would strongly advise you to choose a hosting service with backups included.
- Site builder: Site builder is an entertaining and easy-to-use tool with many drag-and-drop functions that every budding blogger would love to have as it lets you create your blog’s visual appearance without any coding. Getting it for free with your cheap web hosting plan can save you a lot of money for IT developer fees or buying a CMS platform.
In case you choose a plan that doesn’t provide these three very important features, any of them could be added as an extra option to your cheap shared web hosting plan. But as you can guess alone, it is quite more favorable and cheaper for a blogger to get them together with the hosting package.
Other Just Optional but Useful for Bloggers Features
The following options are not as important as the three above, but they are recommended by us and give an extra positive weight when choosing a hosting plan, especially when you are a blogger.
- Cool domain: The domain address is just as important to your blog as its name. It is best when its name matches your blog title perfectly. You can always buy your domain separately from the hosting service, and most hosting companies don’t include a domain price in their cheap hosting plans at all. But there are some hosting companies like “Hostens” that offer a free domain option to each customer. This can save you a substantial amount of investment for your blog.
- Email addresses: Just like the name of the blog is important, your blog-related email is also very significant too. It will always make a great effect if the email you will be using for correspondence with media, advertisers, and readers is the same as the domain of your blog. Usually, there might be a limit of up to 5 or 10 email addresses with most shared packages. But it is much more than enough to satisfy your blog’s needs.
- WordPress management: This option usually includes regular add-on upgrades, additional security options, and resolution of some more specific issues that may arise with the WordPress content management system (CMS). Nowadays, we can choose between dozens of CMS platforms besides WordPress, such as Drupal, Magento, Joomla, Wix, Ghost, Squarespace, etc. If you do not use WordPress for your blog, then you just do not need to purchase a hosting package with WordPress management. But it is good to know that there is such an option in case someday you decide to transfer your blog from the initial site builder platform to WordPress.
Hints on Buying a Cheap Shared Web Hosting
- Choose a favorable payment method: Always check the full list with payment methods of a provider, so you could save money from transfer fees by selecting the most favorable method for you. Habitually, hosting providers accept payments by bank cards and the majority of popular e-wallets (PayPal, Skrill, Neteller, Much Better, etc.). Some of them allow cryptocurrency payments as well.
- Look for the current promotions: By carefully reviewing all the current promotions that are present over the hosting companies, you could do the best deal. As there is huge competition between hosting providers, there are always opportunities to get a good deal with a reduction of at least 30-40%. Sometimes, there are even more advantageous promotional prices. To make the best deal, you just need to review the different offers and the options they include.
- Online reviews: We would recommend that you always check the reviews and ratings given by real users before purchasing a hosting package from a company. You can check such assessments by typing the hosting company’s brand on the Internet or by searching directly on the Trustpilot rating platform. Generally, anything above 4 out of 5 is considered a good evaluation. If the host has a rating below 3.5 out of 5, we will not recommend you choose it, even if the price seems particularly attractive. When we look for the best price, it should not be at the expense of quality. Compromise on the quality of the service would always reflect negatively.
Final Words
For every beginner blogger, there is no better hosting service than a cheap shared hosting plan. The quality of this type of plan is quite enough to satisfy the needs of your blog. And if you get huge popularity, which we sincerely wish you, you can always switch from a shared to a VPS plan to meet your blog’s higher traffic needs.
“Hostens” offers a wonderful cheap shared web hosting plan that includes almost all of the important features that could be useful for every beginner blogger, such as a free domain option (ending in .SITE, .WEBSITE, .TECH, .ONLINE, .STORE), a great website builder, and daily backups. In addition, its Trustpilot rating, which reveals the customers’ satisfaction with so many brands around the globe, is truly impressive.