Hosting

I am looking to create a website using wordpress. I have narrowed it down to two hosting companies, Bluehost and Siteground. Obviously I want the cheapest option but one that will be suitable for me.

The basic plan with siteground will cost £36 a year with free domain name. This offers 10gb webspace.

The basic with Bluehost will cost me around 48 a year. I will have to buy the domain elsewhere which is £4.99 but this plan offers 50gb webspace.

I am stuck now as I don't know which to go for? Is 10gb enough webspace for a small start up business? The website will be for uploading my work and also having a small shop where people can buy prints, cards, etc.

Many thanks
 
I've used Bluehost in the past and never had any problems. They were a little more expensive than some others, and you can only register *.com domains through them, though I tend to just use 123 Reg for all of mine now so it's not much of a bother. However, their data servers were all based in the US, which isn't ideal if you're targeting customers in the UK. They may have added international servers since then though. Siteground I believe allow you to choose where your server is located. The closer it is to your target customers, the faster the load speed.

What sort of products are you selling? 10GB is generally ok for a smaller site, though it could fill up quite quickly if you have a lot of products with large images. You can use something like the TinyPNG plugin to reduce the size of images as you upload them. You get an allowance each month, and after you pay pennies per upload, so there's no danger of amassing huge bills.

The main thing to look at is data allowance. Their basic package says it's suitable for ~10k visits per month. Over this they'll probably charge you for extra bandwidth. That happened to me when I was with Bluehost. One of my blogs had a massive influx of traffic and I exceeded my data allowance, causing me to have to pay extra twice in one billing period. I had to eventually increase my plan to one that was about £120 a year, simply because of the amount of traffic and database load.
 
Thanks for your reply. Well it will be used to offer design services so will have some images of previous work such as logos etc. A while back I started selling designs on Ebay, since that took off I am getting fed up with the Ebay fees which are taking a chunk out of my profits each month which is why I am looking to create my own website. So will need to have a small shop on the website also to sell directly to customers. But as it isn't established yet I can't imagine that I will have that much traffic to start will. Just wanted to make sure that gb would be enough for a fair few images?
 
10GB should be enough if you're conservative with your file sizes. It's worth thinking about how you will market your site, and whether the cost of this is better than the Ebay fees. Ebay also handles the marketing an drawing in of customers for you. It's safe to assume a fair few buyers likely found your designs simply because they were browsing the site. If you come off Ebay, you will need to entice those customers, plus more to your own site in some way.

There's also additional costs to consider if you're selling products via an e-commerce solution, namely an annual SSL certificate for your site so user data is protected when it's sent to the server, and transaction fees from payment gateways. Carefully work out what it will cost each month, and compare it to sites like Ebay, Etsy, etc. You may find it's cheaper and easier to use something like Shopify to set up a store, though they also take a little of your profit on every sale, plus there's payment gateway fees on top of that too.
 
I'm thinking of setting up a shop with Shopify so this is quite interesting.

Just a note on SiteGround.

If you go through their years hosting offer and get to the checkout.
Click back or go to leave and another discount window pops up (or did when I did mine).
Not sure but I think it was 50%
 
Thanks both!

I bit the bullet and went for the Siteground basic plan. Hopefully it will be enough. Bloody WP isn't as easy as I thought though so I have been tinkering with that. Have you a shop only already Scotty?
 
Not yet. There a a few pre built shop themes made to link with Shopify which are free.
There's also the Shopify app you can add to any WP themes.
It's basically a buy button.
 
If you add it to your own site it's $9 per month and the basic package for a hosted site is $29.
 
Should be as simple as, 'put this image at the top of the page, to the left please'. Actually no, it should just be all drag and drop with no horrible code at all. Sorry to any web designers reading this who loves coding :/
 
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