In the previous article, I explained what a domain is and what hosting is, and why you need both. We established that a domain is an address, and hosting is the space behind it. Hosting provides email and a place for your website.
In the hosting article, I started to go into a bit more detail — not just about the type of hosting (we'll get to that in a separate piece), but about where the price differences between providers actually come from, and what makes an offer attractive or worth your interest.
Generally speaking, cheap doesn't have to mean bad, and expensive doesn't have to mean best, but…
Having read the previous articles, you should already have an idea why everyone online recommends different services. It's because the wide variety of service offers, available software, graphical interfaces, security parameters, scope of support, server locations, and the presence of resellers all mean that everyone can choose a service matched to their needs, their budget, and also their ability to manage that service.
Read also:
- What should you consider when choosing a hosting service?
- What is shared hosting?
- What is an FTP server and an FTP connection?
- What is an SSL certificate?
Unfortunately, it's exactly this last factor that many people forget when recommending a particular service. Provider X's offer might be cheaper, and provider Y's more flexible, but it's only choosing provider Z that lets even someone with no IT background handle adding an email account and launching a website. Once they've learned the basics, they'll reach a stage where they understand their needs better and are ready to choose a different solution — a different one, meaning better and stronger, whether by staying with the same provider or switching hosting companies entirely.
But price, flexibility, ease of use, availability, and how appealing it is to grow your portfolio of services all come down to many factors — including small things like whether Customer Service is actually reachable, whether documentation is available, help with both simple and difficult issues, weekend support, reliability, and so on. Price doesn't have to say anything on its own, but it should draw your attention to what's behind the service — what it translates into, and what the company can offer you in the months and years ahead.
The internet: full of information and difficult decisions
Browsing discussions on forums and groups, users often rely either on someone else's experience or use arguments that don't apply to me at all. I don't know what problem they have or had, or whether the real fix was actually switching hosting, or whether the issue was with their website itself. Or maybe, instead of learning a new client panel, they preferred sticking with popular solutions that aren't necessarily easy or appealing to me.
Another issue is support, which I might only need for reporting problems with how my service is running, or which might be a source of valuable information. Few companies have their own in-house Customer Service department, staffing dozens of people ready to talk to customers and help them.
Leasing and reselling services lets a company lower its costs. It becomes a reseller, meaning it only sells as much service as its customers actually buy, while a server administrator elsewhere guarantees availability. If a company manages its services itself, though, it needs to both keep its existing customers happy and hold a suitable reserve of resources for further sales.
Having your own server infrastructure gives you full control over your services, but it isn't free.
To minimize costs, ready-made solutions get deployed (software, panel, and so on), but with enough budget, a company can invest in expanding or changing that setup, introducing custom solutions that translate into, for example, a simpler experience for the user.
And after all, the defining feature of hosting is how simple it is to use — managing the service through a friendly graphical panel interface. Every action comes down to a single button, so to add an email account, you simply click Add mailbox, giving it a password and a name. The server administrator sets up the panel and the tools available in it.
So that the server and hosting administrator can easily keep resources under control and guarantee you uninterrupted hosting service, certain resource limits and security parameters get put in place. That's why hosting isn't the right service in every case. First: if you need unlimited resources. Second: when you want full control over the software, including whatever software your target application needs to run.
That's why we also distinguish additional types of hosting — VPS hosting, SEO hosting, reseller hosting — as well as different types of servers, such as VPS, dedicated, and so on, matched to the user's needs and priorities: for example, when what matters is flexibility and access to resources without paying for unused space or hiring an administrator, or the opposite, when you want to run your own custom setup and have full control.
Server location and the jurisdiction servers fall under can also turn out to be key, along with the technology used to run and manage them, reliability, and so on.
When choosing hosting, the limits set by the server administrator matter too — the security parameters that, within a hosting service, can both restrict how many sites you can run and guarantee that they keep running without interruption.
Summary
And so the circle closes: each of the factors above affects, to a greater or lesser degree, both customer satisfaction and the service's appeal, availability, and, of course, price. So while advice found online is a valuable source of information, you still need a starting point, so you don't get burned.
All of this ties back to what I wrote at the start: a new user, who has every right not to know the ins and outs, will see an offer differently than an experienced user who expects a price matched to their actual needs, not an oversized service. And here too, you shouldn't just be guided by a specific hosting offer from a specific provider, but also by choosing the right hosting service or server type in the first place.
There are no two identical services on the market.
I use home.pl's services, and I value that. Is it expensive? Comparing security parameters, the company's track record, its changes and growth, and not a single outage in 7 years — I don't think it's expensive, and I don't think it's cheap. So what is it? Reliable. I'll come back to this topic in the future, though.
This article is not sponsored. In it, I'm expressing my personal opinion, and it's what I base the knowledge I'm sharing on. You have the right to voice your own opinion, and you have the right not to share mine. Please respect the work that went into it, though.