The web hosting market is growing every year. And so the hosting companies always offer the best services, with cheap web hosting plans to gain market. In this article, we will explain why web hosting prices are going down and down every year.
Introduction to the cheap web hosting plans
The hosting plans prices are going down every month. In the middle ’90s, a cheap web hosting plan used to cost more than 40€ per month. In the early 2000s, this price went down to 10€. Nowadays, Copahost offers cPanel and DirectAdmin hosting plans for as low as 1,99€ (Economy Hosting).
In this article, we will explain how a web hosting plan can become really cheap, and also explain cases of Dreamhost, Bluehost, Ix Hosting and Hostgator. Some advantages of 2017’s cheap web hosting plans, compared to the early 2000s:
- More powerful servers. Today’s CPUs are 400% faster than 10 years ago.
- Cloudlinux, which allows you to control the server resources, protecting each customer from overloads.
- Many backup possibilities, through cPanel, phpMyAdmin or R1soft.
- Better reseller hosting usability
Cloudlinux hosting: better server performance for cheap web hosting
More powerful servers, more optimizations. How does it work? The answer is simple: Cloudlinux. It’s a CentOS-based operating system that isolates every website, just like a virtual server. Cloudlinux hosting is being a market standard nowadays.
It allows you to control much more the CPU, RAM, IO and processes of the hardware server. A couple of years ago, without Cloudlinux, one or two customers could monopolize the entire CPU sometimes, slowing down the whole server. Nowadays, each hosted website is totally isolated, with its processes fully controlled. Bigger hosting plans tend to have more % of RAM and CPU. Cloudlinux made it possible to host 200% more websites in a single server, with the very same performance, providing much more stability to the server. This makes the web cheap day by day.
Softaculous auto-installer
With Softaculous you can install automatically several applications, like WordPress, Joomla, install Magento, install MyBB and many others. Even without advanced technical knowledge, you can have a great website, like a blog, forum or an online store. Having an auto-installer saves you time, like technical hours from a technical or a programmer. Any person without technical knowledge can have its blog installed, for instance.
Free SSL Certificates
Copahost is now offering free SSL certificates with the cheap web hosting plans Value Hosting and Professional Hosting. By ordering a hosting plan, you have access to generate unlimited free SSL certificates, as you wish. Each Free SSL lasts for 3 months and must be renewed for free from your hosting control panel. Copahost offers several articles and tutorials showing how to generate a free SSL certificate.
Considering that an SSL Certificate used to cost more than 50€ per year, having a free SSL option saves you 600€ in 10 years. This new SSL option can be applied to any hosted website in your server, as you wish. Considering you have 10 websites hosted, saving 50€ per year each of them, that’s an economy of 6,000€ in a decade.
There is no magic. There are many SSL providers, with their own root-certificates. A root certificate is a “widely known” key by every browser (or at least the most used ones). As a root-certificate owner, the SSL provider can estimate freely how much they will charge per certificate, or even, simply not charge for them. This market evolution really made web hosting cheap within the last years.
Free web hosting: does it still exist?
The answer is Yes. But, there is no free hosting company delivering quality on its services anymore. It’s impossible to provide technical support and a premium uptime without charging for this service. In the past, some companies used to promise free unlimited web hosting. Some of them could only deliver such a dream during a limited time.
The best alternative is choosing an established and robust hosting company, with some years in the market.
Dreamhost, Hostgator, IX Web Hosting and Bluehost cases
Even if these companies promise cheap web hosting services, truth is, you can only get really cheap prices if you pay many years in advance. By placing monthly or yearly payments, the customer ends up paying high bills. Or else, their cheap plans will offer the possibility to host only one domain.
Bluehost “cheap” services
At Bluehost, you can see some cheap server hosting offers, but as you click signup, such price is only valid if you pay 3 years in advance.
Dreamhost “cheap” hosting
At Dreamhost, a similar trick happens if you don’t pay several years in advance. They used to offer cheap domains to attract customers, but at the renewal date, the price used to rise strongly.
The truth about Cheap web hosting: which is the best?
At Copahost you will find true cheap hosting prices, with no tricks. Of course, prices will vary slightly according to the period you choose to pay in advance, but only Copahost offers an honest and trustworthy pricing scheme. The best web hosting company will deliver a good price and qualified technical support simultaneously.
Copahost is over 12 years in the market, and we are specialists in cPanel, DirectAdmin, WordPress and many other technologies.
Cheap VPS hosting with CPanel
Not only cheap web hosting plans are important to be mentioned. VPS Hosting is also helping the entire market to save money. Just like the shared web hosting plans, the VPS Server plans are lower nowadays. You can order a cheap VPS hosting with cPanel for less than 19€. That’s 3,59€ for the VPS Server, plus 15€ for the cPanel license (monthly). The cPanel license for a VPS server, for instance, costs 15€ per month. This price didn’t go down within the last years, but what’s the big deal? VPS Hosting is more and more powerful in the last years. With a hardware node Xeon E5 with more than 128 GB of RAM, for instance, you can host packed VPS Servers with many CPUs and IO usage.
Basically, a VPS Server in the 2000s that used to handle, let’s say, 20,000 requests a day, used to cost a lot more. The price was around €100 per month for a VPS Hosting with 512 MB of RAM, 1 vCPU and 10 GB of disk space. This same task can be done for a budget of less than 20€ today, as the hardware of a VPS is much lower.
Some advantages of choosing a cheap web hosting plan in a VPS server:
- Privacy, as you don’t share the same server with other customers
- Full resources control, like CPU usage, processes, applications, mail queues, etc.
- Full customization of your server
- Root/SSH access
- You can create a custom branding, with language customization.
- Wide backup configurations are possible.
This service is similar to a reseller hosting package, but with many more possibilities.
