The True Cost Of Cheap Hosting

Web hosting is important for your website. Full stop.

To have a better grasp of what this means, here's a simple explanation: Your website is like a house, and before you even start building your home, you need to find a nice piece of land for your house to sit on.

But what kind of land are you looking for? A good piece of land means it has enough space for everything: your car, pets, kids and even your personal collection of antiques. The property should also have good quality soil, not something your house would suddenly sink into and disappear down the muck. Also, you want to buy a good section for your house in a nice neighborhood where it’s safe and secure; no trespassers who dare run off with vegetables from your garden. You’ll also want land that's not close to the main highways either, where the noise will be a problem, and the traffic unbearable. When you start to think about it, there's so much to consider when you're purchasing a good solid foundation for your home.

The same goes for websites that need good web hosting.

You need a web hosting provider that has secure site servers and ample storage for your data. You want servers that don't go offline when you need them the most. You need hosting that can handle site traffic during peak hours or even sudden viral events.

There are plenty of hosting options available today, but choosing the most appropriate one for your website is not just a manner of picking the one with the most competitive pricing plans. In fact, cheap hosting can provide you with more problems than solutions in the future. As the saying goes, anything cheap often comes at a high cost.

Defining Cheap Hosting

If you thought free hosting was the hell-hole of free ads, wait till you really see the raw deal behind cheap hosting. The downside to this service is- you actually paid money for it. At least with free hosting, you knew what you were getting into. Most free hosting services are upfront about their ads and pop-ups. Cheap hosting, however, is duplicitous. There is no bargain to be had, just lousy service and longer downtimes for your website.

Cheap hosting providers can be generally defined as no-frills providers; they provide you with the bare minimum of everything – usually. Typically, they are not the fastest, they do not offer 24/7 custom customer services, nor are they perceived to be the most reliable providers.

If you’re a technical person, then you can forego the bespoke customer service that cheaper hosting providers include in their pricing bundles because that’s just an illusion, that’s all marketing razzmatazz made to lure you in. Combined with slow customer service, getting your site running again might take a while, and that can be frustrating. Hopefully, these cheap hosting server admins are not ignoring you on purpose, and it’s just that their hosting service is run on unreliable servers. Though you may have bought a cheap hosting plan that says it's exclusively hosting your business site, sometimes this is not true, you’d be incensed to find out you're under a shared hosting structure with a number of other sites.

Cheap Hosting Affects your Bottom-line

If your website is responsible for your leads and conversions, expect pretty dismal sales if your site is always offline.

On the topic of time, it is a well-known fact that cheap hosting is synonymous to slower servers since you get what you pay for. Did you know that a slowdown of just a second from your loading time on your website can cost you up to 7 percent in conversions?

Compounded over a year, that’s definitely a lot of money for small to medium enterprises.

CRO specialists, experts on conversion rate optimisation, have been studying the attention spans of users and slow loading websites would only mean your users would instead go elsewhere if nothing shows up on their screens.

Yes, Speed Also Helps Your Search Engine Optimisation - SEO

It is claimed there are over 250 different ranking factors that affect your website’s ability to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). One of these primary factors is your site speed.

It is no surprise that site speed plays an important role in ranking because it means that your site is more accessible and built for users. Apart from maximising your Content Delivery Network (CDN) having faster hosting can dramatically improve your site load times.

Location Matters

If you do want to save money on hosting, then consider the locality of your hosting. Local hosting provides you with faster load times for your site visitors. If only a minute fraction of your visitors come from a certain area and the majority comes from somewhere else, then invest more in the place where most of your visitors are from.

Also, consider global tech and regulations laws, some Telcos and ISPs are governed by net neutrality and privacy laws, so servers from those territories have a way of affecting the quality of your hosting.

Protection for the Long Run

At the end of the day, what you really need from a hosting provider is good customer service, reliability and optimal server speed. There is no compromise on these three factors, especially if your online presence brings in the sales opportunities, supply orders and work contracts. That’s your livelihood and the core of your business right there!

If you’re spending more time doing the troubleshooting yourself, while waiting for some semblance of life from customer support, then your website is better off hosted elsewhere.

Start it Right: Invest in Good Hosting

Consider how cheap doesn’t always equal quality and reliability, you can find many web hosting providers that do full-service hosting with great uptimes and unlimited space which can help you scale up later on. You just have to know where to look and what to look out for.

Want to know how we at 1768degrees.com can help you? Visit our site and contact us and let’s discuss how the hosting packages offered and backed by 1768degrees.com best support your business needs. We are with you every step of the way. And YES - all hosting includes SSL (the little padlock showing your sites secure).

© Scoop Media