How Premium Hosting is Worth Your Money

Are you on the lookout for a new hosting provider or package for your website? Are you fed up with the limitations of your existing plan? Are you willing to pay slightly more in return for an excellent and feature-rich hosting service?

If you answered in the affirmative for each of those questions, a move to a premium hosting server beckons you. Every website at the beginning performs well even with shared hosting. With time however, shared hosting or even low priced VPS and dedicated hosting falls short of what your website needs and prevents you from making the most of your Apache, Microsoft or LiteSpeed hosting. That is where a premium hosting package comes to your rescue. Yes, it does cost more and in some cases, even double the entry level hosting packages. However, in this essay we look at why the extra money you pay for premium hosting is always worth it.

Dedicated IP Address

One of the most underrated advantages of premium web hosting, a dedicated IP address is one of those things whose value is not realized till the time a crisis comes calling. Let’s assume your website is hosted on a shared server, whose IP is shared by all websites hosted on it. Now if one of the sites hosted alongside yours on the server starts spamming around and as a result is blacklisted, your website suffers as well. For example, the blacklisting mail server can block all mails originating from a blacklisted IP address, which means your mailers will be blocked as well.

With premium hosting, you get a dedicated IP address. That means you and you alone are responsible for your online reputation and even if you share server space with other websites, the dedicated IP ensures you are shielded from any misdeeds by the other sites.

Own Domain Name

Your domain name represents your brand identity. It needs to stand out on its own and make it easier for customers and business associates to remember your services or products. Your own domain name helps achieve those goals. For instance, did you know having your own domain name causes search engines to rank your website higher in their search results? Moreover, people are likelier to respond to your communications positively if it comes from an email ID that bears your domain name. Such an ID lends a degree of professionalism to all your communications with customers as well as associates.

But perhaps the most underrated aspect of having your own domain name is the credibility it adds to your brand. That is why a premium hosting server makes a lot of sense as it lets you have your own personalized email.

Free SSL

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, is a protection mechanism that encrypts the data between two servers. If your website deals with sensitive information or runs an ecommerce operation, you must use SSL protection. That is because security breaches are common these days and have the power to damage the customer’s confidence in your business irreparably. With SSL, data is decrypted only at the host’s end while only the client computer verifies the server certificate. In case there is an interruption, the session is discontinued immediately and needs to be reestablished. The padlock icon in the address bar, which confirms if a site has implemented the SSL/TLS protocol, reassures customers that any vital data they share is 100 percent safe and secure.

With a premium web hosting package, you do not have to pay separately for SSL. Most reputed hosting providers offer SSL security as part of their premium services, which is another reason why any serious website or business must opt for a high-end hosting package.

Disk Space & Bandwidth

When your website is still in its infancy, even 1 GB of disk space and 1 TB of bandwidth might seem like a lot. However, once the traffic to your website starts picking up, these limits fall woefully short. To upgrade the disk space and bandwidth, you’ll likely have to make a few phone calls to your provider and when you end up doing this every month, it’s a sign you need a more premium hosting package.

With a premium hosting server package, you’ll get enough disk space and bandwidth to ensure a smooth performance for your website, regardless of whether it has a 100 concurrent users or 10,000. And while the exact features and configurations of a premium package differ from one provider to another, it’s safe to assume a disk space of at least 100 GB and unmetered bandwidth to be offered. 100 GB of disk space is sufficient to account for the most media-rich websites while an unmetered bandwidth ensures any spike in visitor traffic does not slow your website down.

Premium is the Way to Go   
 
Regardless of whether you need Apache, Microsoft, nginx, Google or LiteSpeed hosting, buying a premium hosting package for your website can pay rich dividends down the road. If you have a vision for your business, and thereby the website, a premium hosting server package is best equipped to help you achieve that.