Tips On Reducing Your Hosting Costs

Tips On Reducing Your Hosting Costs

Learn how to better manage and reduce your hosting costs, email and domain fees - after all, saving money is usually high on everyone's list!

Discounts for Multiple Sites and Referred Websites

If you have more than one website, you should be getting a discount on your second and subsequent websites. This discount appears as a credit on your account, on the same day as the hosting fee is billed. If you are not getting that discount, please request we add it for you. The discount will not be applied to hosting plans of the same or lesser value. 

Domain Fees

It's cheaper if you register your domain for several years. This way you get our best rates. We also offer our best renewal rates for sites on live hosting plans. This includes a DNS only hosting plan, or an email only plan. If you don't have a live plan enabled with us, then you will only get our standard renewal rates, which are designed to cover the cost of providing DNS services. If you have one live website, and some additional domains, you should make sure your domains are all connected to the live website, to get the best renewal rates, and benefit from the mailbox allowance of the main site.

Email and Mailboxes

We provide more mailboxes on higher hosting plans, and less mailboxes on lower hosting plans. This is to allow smaller businesses access to the better rates, and bigger businesses to cover the costs of supporting email accounts for multiple staff, and the additional email processing that goes with having more staff. If you are a small business, please make sure you don't have multiple mailboxes. You only need one mailbox per person. You can setup free email forwarding rules for your other email addresses. This solution is both cheaper and easier to manage if you want to check your webmail. 

Hosting Plans

We have designed our hosting plans in such a way that nearly every plan offers the same features, but varying usage limits. The principle is that new businesses can pay less, and get access to all the features they need to grow. More successful businesses pay a little more and this covers the higher usage, like website traffic, more transactions, more email, more everything. It is better to be on a hosting plan that has more capacity than you need, so that you can grow into it. Everyone should be on our standard plan at least, so you get access to SSL certificates. Cheaper plans are only for simple brochure websites, with no functionality, and mainly for clubs who just want a presence, and email service. 

Excess Usage Fees

No one wants the shock of excess fees at the end of the month. Make sure you are on a plan with plenty of capacity for your business. We are willing to waive excess fees in exceptional circumstances, where a one off spike does not average out as being excessive over your recent history. However, if you are riding close to your hosting plan limit every month, then it is time to move up a plan. We trust that if you ever get an excess fee, that we hope you are doing such great business, that this fee will pale in comparison to your profits, generated from having an awesome website. However, sometimes a poorly crafted website can get excess fees on very low traffic. Please avoid uploading video to our servers. It is best to host video on a streaming service like YouTube or Vimeo. Avoid uploading PDF documents that were designed for professional print with high resolution images embedded. Ask your publishing company to provide a low resolution PDF, aiming for a filesize of only a few megabytes or less. If you have a 10MB file, downloaded only 100 times, then that is 1GB traffic. On higher traffic websites, avoid having too many high resolution images on your home page, or limit your slideshow to only 3 or 4 images at max. Avoid having category pages with hundreds of products in them. These tips will keep your usage lower and help you avoid excess usage fees!

Tags: web hosting  

Posted: Friday 1 June 2018