Choosing the right hosting plan and when to upgrade

All web hosting plans have different features and offer different levels of resources. How do you select the right plan for you? Shared hosting plan is by far the most popular one as it is economical and suitable for most web sites. With thousands of web hosts competing for your business and endless offers of unlimited bandwidth and disk space, the new or less experienced webmaster will usually be tempted to go with the lowest priced hosting they can find. You can start with the cheapest plan but usually this will end with 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. Often these companies are here today and gone tomorrow. Also these businesses are trying to turn a profit in order to offer something too good to be true, they 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:

Shared Hosting:

As the name suggests, shared hosting – it 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 limits on resources. It is essential to know what features you need for your site and how demanding it can get in terms of the resources consumption. If you are not certain, it 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, the number of hosted domains and possibly the 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 with 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. Dream Line IT Solution has several shared hosting plans to choose from – Value, Professional Ultimate plans. In addition to these, there is Business SSD plan.

Business Hosting:

Business SSD hosting represents the highest quality and most powerful hosting solution available without moving to a dedicated server. In terms of shared hosting, Business Hosting offered by Dream Line IT Solution is second to none. Our Business Hosting servers are very fast and limited to no more than 50 accounts on each server. This plan has no limits on: Hosted Domains / Parked Domains / Subdomains / FTP users / Databases / or Mail accounts. It also provides high priority support and much higher limits on outgoing email. To state it briefly, the Business SSD plan we offer is a model of perfection in shared hosting plans.

VPS Hosting:

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. This refers to the partitioning of a physical server into multiple servers. In effect each one acts just like a dedicated server, each with its own operating system and each can be rebooted separately. These operating systems each receive a specific share of the resources of the physical server, no more and no less, they are isolated from each other – if one VPS experiences problems or tries to use too much memory or CPU resources, it has no effect on the others. There are many advantages to selecting a VPS, the cost is less than the one of a fully dedicated server and VPS provides a great deal of freedom and flexibility over the limitations and restrictions of shared hosting. You are limited only by the capabilities of the VPS, so select one powerful enough to meet your needs. If you don’t feel you have the technical expertise necessary to manage your own VPS, it should not stop you – for an additional fee you can select full management. You won’t have root access and it will be much like a shared hosting plan, but you will still make the decisions.

Dedicated Servers:

A dedicated server is the most powerful option and can be suitable for the most demanding websites. Everything ultimately is running on a server somewhere. All the sites you visit, your hosting account, that internet radio station you listen to, the streaming videos you watch, this site you are viewing now, everything. Again I want to point out that full management is an option if you need the power of a dedicated server but you don’t feel you have the technical knowledge to manage your own server. One major advantage of a dedicated server you should be aware of is the ability to upgrade certain features. Even if you outgrow your server, sometimes it isn’t necessary to move to a new server. With shared hosting you can’t buy additional features, you simply have to upgrade to a better plan. With a VPS you are in better shape here because you can buy additional bandwidth, IP addresses, and often additional disk space and maybe even more RAM, but the additional disk space and RAM will fall within certain limits. With a fully dedicated server you are not so limited. You can not only buy the bandwidth you need but you may be able to add gigabytes of RAM or upgrade the port speed or add one or more additional hard drives. Carefully examine the specifications of the servers and find out what upgrades are possible, often a low end server is less upgradeable than one that costs a little more.

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 Dream Line IT Solution you can monitor this yourself thanks to CloudLinux – login to 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 need a safety margin here to allow for surges in traffic during times of peak usage. If possible, try to estimate when you will need to upgrade before the time comes, so that you can avoid any performance issues with your site. 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 its time to upgrade is when you want something that isn’t supported on your current hosting plan. Or maybe you want to host a large number of domains under one account, or you have more than one domain that needs a dedicated IP address, or perhaps you need a very 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, whatever the case may be, 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 Dream Line IT Solution 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 action depends on the hosting plan you are moving from and the one you are moving to. If you are upgrading your hosting here at Dream Line IT Solution, please submit a ticket with our Billing department and we will upgrade your account and assist you with transferring your sites. If you are transferring a hosting account to Dream Line IT Solution 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 please refer to this article.