Payment options
Payment options for companies
When you are registering a hosting account, you should be given the option to register a company account. After registration you will be able to download invoices and other required documents. Most hosting providers allow company account registration. You can pay for their services using a corporate credit card or the company bank account (wire transfer).
Payment options for non-corporate clients
There are many various payment methods available for non-corporate clients. They are supported by almost all hosting providers, except very small companies. The latter can have only a few payment options.
Online payment service
It’s a very quick and comfortable payment method. All that you have to do is to register an account (for instance, PayPal, Dwolla, AmazonPay etc) and pre-fund it or attach a card to it. Then you are welcome to pay for hosting services with it. It takes about 5-15 minutes for the money to be transferred from your account.
Self-service kiosks (terminals)
First of all, you need to check which terminals you can use to pay for the hosting service. Usually, you can find detailed instructions on how to pay using self-service kiosks on the hosting provider’s website. It takes about an hour for the payment to be accepted.
Credit/debit card
You will be able to use any Visa or MasterCard card. Most likely, you will need to pay a certain transaction fee but it is usually quite small. It takes up to 1 hour for the funds to be transferred from your card.
Cash
It is not the most popular payment method. Mostly, it is applicable for corporate clients. We recommend to read the article about this kind of payment method on the hosting company website thoroughly before choosing it. It takes about a few days for the money to be transferred.
Wire transfer
It is also not widely supported. Nevertheless, this payment method is available for both corporate and non-corporate customers. You need to get all of the required details (e.g. bank account number) from the hosting provider and then go to the bank and make the transfer. It is also possible to initiate the transfer via online banking. Depending on the bank, it may take 2-5 days for the money to be transferred.
Direct carrier billing
Basically, you pay using your phone balance. The carrier may take a certain fee, about 10% of the amount. Quite a quick payment method: it takes around 5 minutes for the money to be transferred.
How to find a hosting provider with a certain payment method?
We have categorized the hosting companies by the following payment methods that they accept:
Credit/debit card
PayPal
Wire transfer
Bitcoin
What billing cycle is it better to choose while purchasing hosting?
In most cases, hosting providers offer nice discounts, if you choose annual or semi-annual billing cycles. However, if you are not certain regarding the quality of this particular hosting service, we recommend to choose the monthly billing cycle. Also, there are a lot of companies that offer free trial periods (during 7-50 days).
During this period you can test the services and decide whether this service meets your requirements. Here is the rating of hosting providers that provide trial periods. Moreover, most of the popular hosting companies offer a money-back guarantee. Depending on the money-back policy, there are three possible scenarios:
- You will get a full refund but only during a certain period after order placement (here is the rating of hosting companies that have a good money-back policy);
- You will get a refund for the unused period (e.g. you bought a hosting for one year but used it for only one month);
- The service is non-refundable.
Advice from our experts
- Renew domains and hosting in time! In case you forget to renew your hosting before expiration date, it still will be possible to renew it within 5-30 days (depending on the company renewal policy). Otherwise, you may lose all of your files and backups. Regarding domains, the situation is a bit different. Domains with certain TLDs (mostly ccTLDs) may be deleted (released) without any possibility to renew them the next day after the expiration date. Others, on the contrary, can be renewed for a certain fee within 60 days after expiration days. That’s why we recommend to renew your domains 14-30 days prior expiration.
- Don’t be afraid of online payments. Your card details can be stolen by viruses and malicious programs on your PC but not by the hosting company.
- Do not purchase the hosting from a provider that you consider suspicious for any reason.
We highly recommend not to purchase the cheapest hosting package. Usually, they come with a row of issues: the server is often down, the hardware is outdated, lousy and slow support, registration and payment errors, etc.
For your convenience, we have created a tool that can help you to choose the right hosting package for you just by answering a few simple questions.
CMS is a content management system. A lot of hosting providers offer so-called CMS optimized packages. However, this is a marketing trick because most CMSs do not have special software or hosting requirements.
Trial period is a period of time, usually from 7 to 30 days, during which you can use the hosting services for free to test them.
Moneyback policy allows the customer to receive a refund for his order within a certain period after the purchase.
OS means the operating system is installed on the server. We recommend to choose Linux hosting unless your website requires another OS.
Bulletproof hosting - it’s a type of service that allows to host almost any type of content, even the restricted one (adult content, warez, spam etc). Bulletproof hosting providers do not remove your content in case someone reports an abuse.
Unlimited hosting - refers to companies that provide packages with unlimited disk space, bandwidth, number of domains, databases or email accounts, etc. This is usually a marketing trick but sometimes you can find something worth a try.
Secure hosting - it’s a type of service when the hosting provider is mostly responsible for the security of the user’s account: updates the software installed on their servers, provides an antivirus and malware scanner, firewalls and basic anti-DDoS protection, etc.
DDoS-protected hosting - companies that provide packages that include anti-DDoS protection. These packages are considerably more expensive than regular ones. Nevertheless, they’re totally worth their price because the company will ensure that your website is secured from cyber attacks.
Most websites require MySQL and PHP installed on the server to work correctly. Almost all hosting providers support these technologies.
ASP.NET is a Microsoft web application development platform.
The more comfortable the control panel is, the easier will it be for you to change the website and hosting account settings.
Most hosting providers that are in TOP20 in our rating offer user-friendly control panels, such as cPanel, Plesk or DirectAdmin. That’s why we recommend to pay attention to other, more important parameters, while choosing a hosting provider.