How to choose a hosting plan you won't outgrow or overpay for

Start with the software your site runs on

Before comparing prices, find out what your website needs to run. A site made of ready-made pages, images and styles can be served from almost anywhere. A site built with WordPress, an online shop or a booking system assembles each page when it's requested, using a programming language and a database, so the plan has to support both, in versions your software accepts.

WordPress spells its requirements out: PHP version 8.3 or greater, MySQL 8.0 or greater or MariaDB 10.11 or greater, and HTTPS support. It will still run on PHP 7.4 and MySQL 5.5.5, but WordPress itself warns that those versions have reached end of life and may expose your site to security vulnerabilities. A plan that only offers older versions isn't a bargain; it's a move you'll have to make later.

Count your sites as well. A second brand, a client project or a test copy for trying changes safely may each count as a separate site under a plan's limits. Ask your developer the questions below and note the answers beside each plan.

Estimate your traffic with one simple sum

Bandwidth, sometimes called data transfer, is the total size of everything your site sends to visitors in a month. You can estimate it with a single multiplication: visitors a month, times pages per visit, times page size. The same Web Almanac found that images make up the largest share of a typical page on both mobile and desktop, followed by JavaScript and fonts.

Take a site with 2,000 visitors a month who each view three pages. At 2.86 MB a page, that comes to about 17 GB. Treat it as a generous ceiling: browsers keep copies of images and scripts they've already downloaded, inner pages are usually lighter than home pages, and some bytes, such as an embedded video, come from another company's servers rather than yours. If your site already exists, use real figures from your analytics.

For many small sites, though, the busiest hour matters more than the monthly total: the morning a newsletter lands, a product launch, or bookings opening at nine o'clock. A page served from a cache costs the server very little, while a checkout or search results page is built afresh for every visitor. Ten people reading a cached article is a far lighter load than ten people paying for orders at once, so describe your busiest hour to a prospective host and ask which limit you would reach first.

What 'unlimited' and 'unmetered' really mean

Every server has finite processing power, memory and disk, and on shared hosting many accounts share them. So when a plan promises unlimited storage or bandwidth, the limits haven't disappeared; they've moved into the fair-use or acceptable-use policy. Look there for caps on processor time, memory, processes running at once, database size or the number of files (sometimes called inodes), and for rules that storage is for the website only, not for archives or personal backups.

'Unmetered' usually means the host doesn't count the data you transfer. It doesn't mean the connection, or the server behind it, has no ceiling.

The UK's advertising regulator offers a useful yardstick. Its guidance on 'unlimited' broadband and mobile deals says the claim is likely to be acceptable if a legitimate user incurs no additional charge or suspension for going over a usage threshold, and if any limits on speed or usage are moderate only. Hosting isn't covered by that guidance, but the test translates into one plain question for any host: if my site crosses your fair-use line, do you slow it down, charge me more, or switch it off?

Compare the price you'll pay in year three

Many hosting plans are sold like subscriptions: an introductory price, then automatic renewal at the standard rate. The US Federal Trade Commission warns that an automatic renewal might charge more than you paid last time, for example because you started on a promotional rate, and advises reading renewal notices closely.

So compare the total over the time you expect to stay, not the first month. Add the renewal price and anything sold separately: backups, email, a certificate for HTTPS, the domain after a free first year, and any fee for moving your site. Check whether the headline price depends on paying for several years upfront, and what refund you'd get if you left early.

Put the renewal date in your calendar a few weeks early, so that renewing is a decision rather than a surprise on your bank statement.

Ask where the backups live and who restores them

A backup stored next to your website protects you from mistakes, such as a deleted page or a broken update, but not from anything that takes out the building or the account. Ask each host the questions below and write the answers beside the price. Whatever they say, keep your own recent copy somewhere else too: it's the one backup whose location you know for certain.

Start small and decide now what would make you upgrade

With the answers in hand, choose the smallest plan that runs your software, handles your busiest hour with room to spare and comes with backups you understand. Ask whether you can move up a plan later without moving your site; if you can, there's little reason to pay for headroom you may never use.

Then write down what would make you upgrade: pages that were quick turning slow at busy times, warnings that you're close to a resource limit, a second site, or a shop added to a brochure site. Check your usage figures monthly for the first few months. Real numbers make the next decision easy, and they're far more reliable than the word 'unlimited'.