If its single account with Cpanel, SSD server , backup and managed services I feel the cost on hosting can he reduced with a good quality of service.
The OP clearly states it's multiple cPanel accounts:
We're currently hosting our main website and couple of smaller, less critical sites on a package that provides separate Cpanel accounts for each site.
This was later confirmed in response to your question:
One for each website hosted in the package as I have the same one
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As for my response to the OP - the price is fine. I wouldn't go with your current provider personally for numerous reasons but if you're happy with the service I also wouldn't move for the sake of a small financial saving because:
- A lower price doesn't equal a greater ROI.
- I'd rather stick with a known than switch to an unknown for a small saving.
- The service you currently have, multiple cPanel accounts within the same plan, is typically referred to as reseller hosting. Do a price comparison with reseller hosting services and you'll find your price is very much on the lower end, you're not paying a premium.
Whatever you do, don't be tempted to host multiple sites within a single cPanel account. In this set up, all sites run under the same system user which means if one is compromised, they're all compromised. Your current set up is the right one.
Hosting providers are interesting because on the surface they're all the same - the same control panel software, the same software set up (CloudLinux etc), the same BS marketing, the same irrelevant features advertised, the same BS uptime promises. Hardware is relatively cheap these days so resources are plentiful and most recommended providers don't oversell so much that your website is crawling. This would lead most to believe the key differential is pricing and perhaps support, but support is often average at best once a business reaches a certain size because
really good support just doesn't work at the scale and price point of shared hosting providers.
I would say the main key differing factor between providers is how they handle downtime and disaster recovery but that's not something you can measure until it's too late. One day your website will go down. A good provider will be proactively updating their status page (your provider does have an off-site status page, right?) and social media with the latest information. If it's a disaster recovery type scenario, they will have planned for this and will be executing their plan to have your website back up and running as soon as possible. On the other hand, with a bad provider, the first you'll probably know your website is down is when you notice, or even worse a customer notices - next you'll find your provider's own website is down, there's no status page, no social media updates and you're left completely in the dark not knowing whether your website has disappeared into a blackhole to never return.
With that said, if you would like a suggestion for a good hosting provider, a small provider run by people who
know what they're doing (and won't land you in the last mentioned scenario), I would wholly recommend
Freethought Internet (for transparency this is my referral link but you can go direct here if you're more comfortable:
https://www.freethought.uk/).
For some general advice, here's how to avoid problems when it comes to small business website hosting:
- Keep your domain registration separate from your hosting. I recommend Hover - more expensive than most domain registrars but they're good and only deal in domain registrations.
- Keep your email hosting separate from your website hosting. Email is so important in today's world, you don't want it set up on a typical shared hosting service (relying on a single server with no redundancy in place). I would recommend Fastmail. Good web interface, good mobile app, full redundancy in place. I see the OP is using G-Suite which is great, this is the way forward - shared hosting providers are definitely not the place to host business email.
- Host your small website wherever you like but whoever you choose, periodically backup your web hosting account and download this to your computer. If your web hosting provider runs into problems, you can then restore this backup with any other hosting provider and point your domain at the new hosting account.
- Use a service such as Uptime Robot or Status Cake to measure the reliability of your hosting provider and so you know when your website goes down before your customers notice.
Hope this helps.
