Most people choose hosting by the price in the ad. That's understandable, but the advertised price is usually the first-year price, when you pay for the longest period. The better question is a different one: what does your website need to run well, on mobile, every day, and how much will you pay for that in the years that follow?
In short
- Start with the kind of website you have: a business website with a few pages needs far less than a store with hundreds of products.
- Look at the real limits: how many websites, how much disk space, how many PHP processes per site, how many email addresses.
- Get a clear answer to three questions: what renewal costs, how backups are made and where the servers are.
- The people on the other end matter too: in what language, during what hours and through which channel you get help.
Step 1: what kind of website you have
A business website has a few pages, a contact form, maybe a blog. It gets visits, but few heavy requests on the server: it doesn't calculate carts or search through thousands of products. For a site like this, a regular web hosting plan is enough, and what makes the difference is backups, the SSL certificate and email on your domain.
An online store is a different story. Every search, every cart and every order means work for PHP and the database, and cart pages can't be served from cache as easily as a brochure page. Here, what matters more is the resources your website gets, order emails that actually arrive and frequent backups.
Several websites (for example, an agency's, or those of a company with several brands) need a plan that keeps them all in the same account, with space and resources to match.
Step 2: the resources that really matter
On pricing pages you'll see figures like “unlimited traffic” or “up to 2 vCPU”. It's worth knowing what each one means; we explain them in detail in the article on the limits of a hosting plan. In short:
- Disk space is usually shared between the website, databases and mailboxes. A business website takes up little; emails with attachments, on the other hand, can fill up the plan within a few years.
- Concurrent PHP processes tell you how many dynamic requests the website can handle at the same time. They matter most for stores and for busy WordPress sites.
- Memory and CPU on shared hosting are maximum limits (“up to”), not resources reserved just for you.
Step 3: the questions to ask before you pay
What does renewal cost?
Many offers have a low price in the first year and a different, higher one at renewal. Ask directly, or look for the renewal price for the same period in the terms. At NBT Host, renewal costs the same as the first payment for the same period; prices are on the web hosting page.
How are backups made, and who restores them?
A good backup runs automatically, every day, and keeps a copy off the server. Just as important is how easily you can restore it and whether you pay for that. You'll find what a sound strategy looks like in the article on the 3-2-1 rule.
Where are the servers?
If your website collects personal data (a contact form, orders, customer accounts), it matters which country that data is stored in and who processes it. We wrote about this separately in EU servers and GDPR.
What's included?
Check whether the price includes the SSL certificate, email on your domain, backups, moving your website from your old host and installing WordPress. Each of these, paid for separately, changes the total.
Step 4: the control panel and support
The control panel is where you create email addresses, change the PHP version or restore a backup. A clear panel saves you a lot of messages to support. Our panel is Enhance; we introduce it in the Enhance panel in brief.
Support matters on the day something stops working. Ask what language they answer in, during what hours and through which channels: phone, WhatsApp, email.
Which NBT Host plan to choose
As a rough guide, based on the kind of website you have:
| What you have | The right plan | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A business website | Starter | 1 website, 10 GB, 10 email addresses |
| An online store or up to 3 websites | Store | 3 websites, 30 GB, unlimited email, more resources |
| Up to 15 websites | Multi-site | 15 websites, 75 GB |
| More than 15 websites or one very busy website | Cloud | 30–100 websites, more PHP processes per site |
| Your own software, root access | VPS | A server you manage yourself |
All hosting plans include daily backups, a free SSL certificate, email on your domain and free website migration, under the terms here. Plans and prices are on the web hosting, WordPress hosting and cloud hosting pages. If you're not sure, tell us what kind of website you have and we'll tell you which plan you need, before you pay anything.