If you’re a photographer, it is likely you’re going to need trustworthy cheap web hosting for your website or portfolio to sit on. However, it won’t have passed you by that hosting hundreds of hi-res images isn’t going to be cheap or feasible, and so there are other things you need to consider.
The fact of the matter is, there is such a thing as cheap web hosting for photographers. In fact, photographers should not feel inclined to pay sky-high rates for hosting just because they’re having an image-led website.
What to look for in your Cheap Web Hosting?
When you’re browsing online for cheap web hosting, a photographer may be inclined to look at premium packages from the off. However, in essence, your requirements are not too dissimilar to anyone else looking for cheap web hosting. There are a few things you can look out for that will make your hosting work harder for you though, and they are as follows:
- Disk space – This is the one that all photographers seem to get hung-up on when it comes to finding cheap web hosting for their website or portfolio. However, many cheap web hosting packages now come with a huge amount of disk space for you to use. There are steps you can take to limit what space your images use up, we will cover that shortly.Beware those offering unlimited disk space – make sure you check the small print. Some are fantastic offers, but do not assume that unlimited means you can just dump all of your hi-res imagery on there. Your site will almost certainly disappear, or your account charges will sky-rocket. Whenever you see the term ‘unlimited’ or ‘unmetered’ within the realms of web hosting, know that it is never truly unlimited.
- Bandwidth – With all of your visitors browsing your portfolio of images, bandwidth can become an important metric to keep an eye on. However, but following our steps below, cheap web hosting can work perfectly for photography portfolio websites and blogs. Again, many cheap web hosting providers offer huge amounts of bandwidth, or unlimited (same rule applies as above).
- Databases – For those incredibly efficient photographers that would like to implement some sort of database of their images or inventory online (providing you stick to the usage guidelines), then the number of databases offered by your web host can become important. Most cheap web hosting accounts come with at least one nowadays, however if you’re running a content management system (CMS) as well, such as WordPress, then you will need a database for that as well. Make sure you know your hosting requirements before signing up.
Make your Space go further
One key thing to keep in mind whenever you are building a photography website – or any other website heavy on images – is to keep the image optimised. All leading image editing software allow you to ‘save for web’ or export at a certain quality level. To the naked eye when viewing on digital, optimised images do not look much different from those huge hi-res versions.
However, by taking a full-size photo that may be in excess of 4000 pixels wide, re-sizing it to around 1600 pixels wide and reducing the quality to even a middle-of-the-road level (6 works well on Photoshop), can save you an enormous amount of space.,
If you leave your image in high resolution, your disk space will fill up incredibly quickly and your bandwidth will be drained before you know it. The performance of the site will also suffer. With more than 50% of web traffic around the world now originating from mobile or tablet devices, there is no longer a requirement to serve enormous images to all users.