Choosing the Right Hosting Plan Print

Start with the honest question

Most people overthink this, then pick the biggest plan out of caution, or the smallest out of thrift, and both are usually wrong. The right plan is the one that fits what your website actually does, and because you can move up or down at any time, getting it exactly right on day one matters far less than people fear. This article helps you land close, and our article on upgrading or downgrading covers moving once you are running.

The three families

Before the individual plans, know which family you are in, because it is the bigger decision:

• cPanel hosting is our standard shared hosting, for websites and email: a business site, a portfolio, a blog, a brochure site, anything that is not a shop.
• WordPress hosting is for WordPress sites, and adds our built-in WordPress update service, keeping your core and plugins current as part of the plan, covered in our article on the WordPress update service.
• eCommerce hosting is for online stores, and runs on servers with more processing power and memory to handle the load a shop puts on. Stores, including WooCommerce, cannot run on standard cPanel plans, they need this family or WordPress hosting, as our eCommerce getting-started articles explain.

Pick the family first. Then pick the size.

The cPanel plans, smallest to largest

Our shared plans climb a simple ladder, and the names are more fun than descriptive, so here is what each is actually for. Live specifications and current pricing are always on the cPanel hosting page, this article deliberately does not repeat numbers that can change, it gives you the shape.

• Newbie is the starting point: a small personal site, a single-page presence, a handful of mailboxes. Somewhere to plant a flag.
• Wannabe suits a growing small site with a bit more content and a few more mailboxes, past the starter stage but still modest.
• Hipster is where subdomains become unmetered, a good fit for a proper small-business site with room to build something worth showing off.
• Prolebrity is the step where traffic and mailboxes both become unmetered, suited to a business site that is being taken seriously and does not want to think about limits.
• Infamy gives more of everything for a busy, established site with real demands on storage and databases.
• Peerless is the top of the shared ladder, for a substantial site that wants the most headroom shared hosting offers before stepping up to a server of its own.

What every plan includes

The differences up the ladder are mostly quantities, disk space, traffic, mailboxes, databases, and so on. The important things are the same on every plan, from Newbie up:

• NVMe storage on every server, the fast kind, not the cheap kind.
• Free SSL, so your site runs securely from day one.
• A serious security stack: ImunifyAV malware scanning, a ModSecurity firewall, brute-force protection, and daily blacklist monitoring, working quietly on every account regardless of plan size.
• Modern software: current PHP and MariaDB, so your site runs on what today's applications expect.
• A dedicated support human who knows your account, reachable directly rather than through a call centre, as our article on getting support describes.

You do not buy better security or better support by buying a bigger plan. Those come with all of them.

One domain per plan, and why that is fine

Each hosting plan hosts one domain. We do not stack multiple websites into a single plan, which surprises people coming from hosts that allow it, and it is worth understanding as a feature rather than a restriction: every site you run stays independently managed, billed, upgradeable, and movable without disturbing its neighbours.

This sits alongside a genuine freedom, though: you can own as many domains as you like with us, there is no cap on that at all. Each simply gets its own home, whether that is a full hosting plan or a low-cost parking plan for a name you are holding, as our articles on domain parking and ordering additional services explain. Subdomains, on the other hand, are included with your plan, so blog.yourbusiness.tld or shop.yourbusiness.tld need nothing extra.

Still not sure?

Two rules of thumb settle most cases. If you are not running a shop, start on a cPanel plan a little above what you think you need today and let it grow with you. If you are running a shop, you are in the eCommerce or WordPress family regardless of size, because a store needs what those plans provide. And if you genuinely cannot decide, ask us before ordering, tell us what your site does and roughly how much traffic you expect, and we will point you at the right plan rather than the biggest one.

Good to know

The single most freeing thing about choosing a plan with us is that the choice is not permanent. Plans upgrade and downgrade from your client portal, so a plan that fits today and feels tight in a year is a two-minute change, not a migration, our article on upgrading or downgrading covers it. Pick something sensible now, get your site live, and adjust when your site tells you to. That is a far better use of your energy than agonising over a decision you can revise any time.