How much does web hosting cost in Bahrain?

Web hosting in Bahrain costs BD 3.5 a month for shared hosting, BD 8.5 a month for private shared hosting with guaranteed CPU and RAM, and BD 11.5 a month for a virtual private server. Everything above that is either bundled services or resources you probably do not need yet. Here is what each tier actually buys you.

The three real price points

Hosting pricing looks confusing because providers rarely compare like for like. Strip away the marketing and there are three tiers, and the jump between them is about guaranteed resources rather than features.

Shared hosting at BD 3.5 a month puts your site on a server whose CPU and memory are pooled across accounts. Private shared hosting at BD 8.5 guarantees 2 CPU cores and 3 GB of RAM to your account alone, adds SSH access and removes the site transfer limit. A virtual private server at BD 11.5 guarantees 3 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM in an isolated environment you control.

What should always be included

A hosting plan that charges extra for basics is not cheap, it is unbundled. At any of the three price points above you should get all of the following without a surcharge.

• An SSL certificate, so browsers do not flag your site
• cPanel or an equivalent control panel with a file manager
• Unlimited disk storage and unlimited domain hosting
• Unlimited add-on domains, parked domains and subdomains
• POP3, IMAP and webmail with secure connections
• MySQL and PostgreSQL databases
• 24/7 support you can actually reach
• An e-commerce builder and site builder

The costs people forget

The hosting line is rarely the whole bill. Budget for a domain name renewal each year, and remember that the first year is often included free with a plan. If you are running a store, factor in payment gateway fees, which are charged per transaction and have nothing to do with your host.

Then there is the cost of moving. Migrating a site badly loses email, breaks URLs and drops rankings. Ask any prospective host whether they migrate for you. We do, at no charge, and we point the domain only after you have checked the copy on our servers.

When cheap hosting gets expensive

The hidden cost of underpowered hosting is conversion. A site that takes four seconds to respond during business hours loses enquiries every single day, and no amount of marketing budget fixes a slow server. If your traffic has grown and pages feel sluggish at peak times, the BD 5 difference between shared and private shared hosting is the cheapest performance work you will ever buy.

The other hidden cost is downtime. Work out what an hour offline costs your business, multiply it by a realistic number of hours a year, and compare that against the price gap between a host that guarantees 99.9% uptime and one that does not publish a figure at all.