Hosting Costs
Website hosts (services that provide the servers your site and its content live on) can also have drastically varying monthly prices depending on various factors such as the specific services they provide in addition to the hosting such as the amount of traffic your site can support and the reliability of the host. Your monthly cost can vary between a few dollars per month up to several hundred based on these variables.
A cheaper service will be fine for a small business whose site doesn’t see hundreds or thousands of visitors hourly, but if you run a global company that has constant traffic, you’re going to need dedicated servers. Hosting services typically offer these different types of servers:
We typically recommend starting with a Cloud VPS solution due to the speed and reliability.
Shared Servers
Shared hosting means your site will be placed on a server along with hundreds or even thousands of other sites that will all share the space and resources with each other. This is the cheapest option (starting as low as $3.95/month) that can serve your smaller business well, but traffic limitations can create slow load times and have poor scalability and security.
Now, there are some great managed WordPress hosting companies where the websites are hosted on shared servers. These hosting companies have their servers specifically "tuned" for hosting sites that use the WordPress platform where load times and security are less of a concern. These services typically cost around $40 to $75 per month. They offer a great starting point for most local businesses in the legal and medical industries.
Cloud VPS
Virtual Private Server hosting is similar to Shared hosting because your site will share a server with other sites, but there will be fewer sites on the server and they are partitioned separately from each other. This means your site will have more dedicated resources as a baseline and will have some scalability for times of traffic spiking. These servers are still affordable (in the $50-$130 range per month) but allow for increased traffic and provide more reliability.
Cloud Servers
Cloud hosting utilizes a network of servers that all act together as a single system. This means your site is hosted on numerous servers which allows for immense scalability and reliability. If a server on the network goes down, the other servers can pick up the slack and prevent loss of service. Pricing is typically charged on a usage basis with a flat starting rate in the $30 range.
Dedicated Servers
Dedicated hosting places your site on its very own server separate from anyone else’s site. This allows for greater customization and security as well as high performance up to a certain point. A dedicated server will provide the highest speeds but has a hard limit to its scalability. Dedicated servers range in the $80-$500 per month range based on the services provided by the host and the specifications you require.