How to Take Over Your Company’s Web Hosting and Save Money
Whether you are in a small company or a single person with a website, you may be paying way too much for your web hosting and it’s dawning on you right now. Here’s how to take over your web hosting and save a ton of money.
Okay, so you have hired a company that is taking care of the hosting of your website. They are probably charging you over $100 per month for a hosting plan, and you have to pay extra if you want to make changes to your website. Don’t worry, you can do this yourself!
Step 1) Get a cheap, top notch, hosting plan online- These companies will allow you to purchase a “Shared” plan for a little less than $4 a month. This means you share space on the server with a bunch of other people. This is fine for anyone with a basic website. If you have an extremely huge database driven website that needs a lot of security, then you can look into getting a “Dedicated Server” plan. This means you have a complete server dedicated only to your company. This will be a little more expensive per month.
Step 2) Change the domain “Name Servers” to your new hosting account. Any customer service representative at a good online company will help you with this. But, basically it is an action that has to be done by the person who purchased the domain. You probably bought it, or allowed the company you hired to buy it. Ask the NEW hosting company to help you with this. This process will take about 4 to 5 minutes.
Step 3) Get the website files from the old company- Again, make sure you speak to the NEW hosting company about this. You don’t want to have any “dead time” when nothing is on the web. A good hosting company will take care of all this for you, by the way. But basically, you need to get all the files that are on the old company’s server and put them on your new one.
Step 4) Save Money- Now you are paying $4 per month instead of some inordinate amount of money!
Step 5) For website changes hire a web designer- If you need to make drastic changes, then you can still hire a web designer to do the work for you, but if you are really in the mood to save some money, you could convert the entire website into a form that would allow you to make changes whenever you wanted. You can read this article about how to make your own website with free software that comes with hosting plans standard nowadays.
The software is called WordPress, and multimillion dollar companies have built their websites on this free open source software. If you were to do this, you would have your hosting under your own control, as well as your content on your website, of course the choice is up to how much time you can dedicate to learning a little bit. It really is a simple process though.
