A common client question is what is the difference between our basic and standard hosting plans given the small price variation between them.
The answer to this question is an increase in overall performance. This is also the reason for only a small price variation between plans. Both entry-level and standard plans receive the same level of customer support, but the standard plan consumes a larger amount of server resources.
Performance benefits can be divided into two types:
- Those that meet a website’s persistent resource requirements, so powering the backend of an online store for example. This includes the hosting instance’s memory and to a large extent, it’s CPU/processing power.
- Performance benefits that are driven by user (website traffic) consumption. This crucially relates to the hosting instance’s I/O and to a less
extent it’s processing power. In short, I/O is the speed of the hosting instance’s internet connection, for basic this is 2MB/s and for standard hosting plans 4MB/s. This allows for twice the amount of data to be served, essentially doubling the number of people that can view a site at the same time.
Every website is different in terms of the resources it needs to perform effectively. However, generally speaking as traffic increases to a site, the overall resources needed by a website increase. But by increasing the I/O and the CPU power of the hosting instance, the experience of viewing a website can be improved even if only 1 person is navigating the site at any given time as pages load significantly quicker, particularly those that are
In general, we recommend our standard plan because it provides an improved experience for all users. While providing adequate headroom to account for unplanned traffic bumps. While for website’s that have an online store, the standard plan is a requirement due to the increased resources consumed by the website doing back end tasks.
For technically-minded people, our standard plan has the following spec changes:
- Increased I/O from 2MB/s to 4MB/s
- Increase in processor/CPU power by 100%
- Increase in memory from 1GB to 2GB
Our basic hosting plan has 2GBs of SSD storage, while our standard hosting plan has 5GBs of storage. Both plans have unlimited bandwidth.
