21 Nov Why it’s Important to Avoid Cheap Hosting
There are hundreds and thousands of website hosting packages and suppliers across the world but which one should you choose to support your business website?
If you are serious about your business then you need to avoid cheap hosting like the plague.
Cheap hosting can be found littering the internet and you are only one click away from finding a hosting company that you think not only saves you a fortune but promises you everything you’ve been looking for from a web hosting company.
What they’ll really provide you with is a crowded market place where they really don’t have the capacity to host your website and where it takes their technical support days rather than minutes to return your emails.
Consider how much money you could lose every time your website crashes and your customers cannot get onto your site! It really isn’t worth saving x amount of pounds each month with cheap hosting when you could really be losing thousands each month from disappointed customers.
These days your website is the centre of your business; whether you use it to make sales or market your business to draw in customers in a fast and effective way.
What happens when you do sign up for cheap hosting? Well quite simply your business suffers. It really isn’t like choosing a gas or an electricity supplier; getting the cheapest hosting option can cause serious damage to your reliability and reputation.
Here are 4 reasons why cheap hosting is a bad idea:
1. Loading Time
Not only is it important for your website to load quickly for your customers but how fast your website loads is something that Google takes into consideration when ranking your site. How fast it loads could mean the difference between putting you on page 1 or page 15, and for a business this can spell disaster at the highest level.
2. Customer Service
If you have a problem then it’s vital that you get it resolved as quickly as possible. Generally when you use a cheap hosting company it can take days for your problem to be sorted out. You may find that a lot of cheap hosting companies are based abroad and the time zone can cause major headaches or they may even outsource their customer services and when you finally do get to speak to someone they may not even be able to help you sort out your website issues.
3. Over Contended
The contention ratio is the ratio of the potential maximum demand to the actual bandwidth. The higher the ratio means the higher the users that may be trying to use the actual bandwidth at any given time. Cheap hosting companies are selling you capacity to host your website when really they don’t have that amount of capacity to sell. This means that thousands and thousands of websites are being squeezed into servers, so your website will be slow and unable to compete with your competitor’s websites who haven’t opted for cheap hosting.
4. Security
Cheap hosting companies are far more likely to have security issues. They can be hacked a lot easier, so hackers sneak through their poor security that their own developers have set up and they then have instant access to your website. Once that happens you will experience no end of problems. The last thing that any business needs is for their website to be hacked!
Other important points to keep in mind are…
Does your hosting company back-up your site on a regular basis? If they don’t then this can be a problem for you when you have made changes to it, if your website suddenly goes down, will the changes be saved or will they been lost forever? A website that has lots of connectivity issues is extremely hard for the search engines to crawl, which ultimately means that it won’t get indexed properly.
There you have four very good reasons that you should avoid cheap hosting. It always pays to go for a more competitive and reputable company that will provide you with extra bandwidth and at the beginning you may find slightly more pricey but in the end could save you thousands of pounds each year from lost business.
Just remember, if the price is too good to be true then it almost always is!