If you want to host an album of your pet’s pictures, you can afford to tackle and manage a few hiccups within your website. Think about running a large website dedicated to more than 100 retail stores. Here, in this particular scenario, a downtime of an hour will have the same effect as closing down almost 30 physical retail stores for an hour. This will surely result in losing the customers as well as a hefty amount of dollars. Plus, it puts a severe dent to the business operations.
The biggest problem is that people do not understand the need of spending on a good host. They would host anywhere cheap—and cheap hosting is doing good business. Why? Let’s find out!
Demand for cheap hosting service is increasing
With the unprecedented increase in the number of online customers, the demand for cheap web hosts has also increased. This increase in demand for cheap webhosts is triggered by some undeniable circumstances. Individuals and businesses alike today need an online home space to make their presence felt within the online community. But beware there is a catch!
Now, consider a situation, where you are willing to host your website. You want your company’s website to attract more visitors as compared to your competitor. You would love to make more money to stay ahead and above the rest. This is a scenario, where you should not or more precisely, cannot compromise on your website’s quality content and page load speed.
In my earlier post Why my website is fat and slow, I mentioned that a website takes 7.25 seconds on average to load. This statement is emphasized by Michelle Givens in her blog post where she says:
According to industry surveys, most of the visitors assume that a website should take less than 2 seconds to load. After 3 seconds, almost 40% of the visitors abandon a website.
Surely, you would not love to lose your customers due to slow website. Similarly, you will not like to lose your customers due to a bad host. Remember, a cheap host is a bad host. Thus, you cannot compromise on the hosting platform for your website.
In this blog post, I will provide a detailed account on why cheap hosting is expensive? What are the reasons and effects of hosting your website on a cheap host; those contribute to rob you off your money? I will also provide some useful recommendations about saving your money with a potential investment on your webhost, guaranteeing a money-rolling business and ease of life.
A cheap host is a bad host!
Consider a situation: you are called as a guest to someone’s house. The host serves you with a cheap, rotten, and unhygienic food. What will be your reaction? You would simply not like the experience you have with your host. You feel uneasy and there is a sense of you being insulted with the kind of food served to you. You will have a bad opinion about your host.
Same is the case with website hosting. When you start facing problems with your cheap host, you feel that your money is lost. Your efforts went in vain. You know that you have a bad experience with your so called cheap host.
Cheap Hosting: A garden that seems greener
Cheap host service providers use some of the tactics as a trump card. But beware! Cheap hosting is not as effective as you want and the service provider may ditch you at some time. In this section, I will elaborate on the pros and cons of using cheap hosting services for launching your website.
Cost effectiveness
Cost effectiveness is one of the most common traps these cheap hosting service providers use to get a large number of customers on board. They charge you with the minimum cost. It might be the case that the price of the service provider starts at $1.99 (or FREE), but there is little surety that you get the best service package for such a cheap price.
Recommendations
It is not necessary that a cost-effective—or we can say low-price—hosting service guarantees—or even boast of providing—a fast page load speed, fool-proof web security, or round-the-clock customer support. At a very low price, it would be great if they can provide seamless uptime for weeks, if not months.
We recommend:
- Don’t compromise on quality
- Don’t compromise on speed
- Check out and compare the prices of competitors
Adequate data storage and bandwidth space
Cheap hosting service providers use another trick to entice customers to buy their service. Some do provide an adequate disk space to store your data; however, there are others who promise “unlimited” storage and bandwidth.
Recommendations
In reality, the disc space provided is not dedicated but shared. It means you have to share space to store your website-related data, because there are other clients hooked up with the cheap service provider.
We recommend you to:
- Avoid using shared servers
- Choose a dedicated WordPress hosting server to get the maximum data storage and bandwidth space
Cheap Hosting: A bottomless well that is pitch black
All the products and services have their advantages and disadvantages. In the aforementioned paragraphs, I have discussed about somewhat seemingly positive aspects of cheap hosting. Alas! These so called pros have turned into cons. Now, it is time to highlight the primary cons of hosting your website on a cheap server.
Compromise on quality
Quality service is the essence of a successful business. Cheap host service providers do boast of providing quality service with a minute price. This is just like pay more, get more phenomenon. Think about a scenario where you want to host your high traffic website on a cheap server.
What will happen? The website will bog down.
It is because, higher the number of websites on cheap server, higher the time your high traffic website will take to load on a shared server. It means that you have compromised on the speed and performance of your website for a cheap hosting service.
Recommendations
You should think before making a decision to opt for cheap hosting service or not. We recommend you:
- Don’t compromise on website quality
- Don’t compromise on website speed
- Don’t compromise on website performance
Shared servers
No one likes to share his or her identity with any other person. Similarly, you want your website to have unique features that differentiate your website from your competitor. What if you are forced to share your website resources with other websites, hosted on the same server as your website?
Recommendations
Most of the shared servers are prone to hacking. And, if a server is hacked, all the websites on that server go down. We recommend you to:
- Avoid using shared servers
- Use dedicated servers to host your websites
Server downtime and overloaded servers
A good website is one that remains accessible at all times. You will always want your website to be functional and up without any hiccups 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. What if your website suddenly goes down? You came to know that the server of the host has run down, due to heavy traffic on the server.
Cheap hosting is beneficial. But, there are some glaring disadvantages which you generally tend to ignore. Server downtime is one such disadvantage that eventually robs you off your valued customers, who once had visited your website.
Recommendations
A load of traffic on a single cheap server can cause your website to slow down. We recommend you to:
- Opt for fast, reliable, and efficient servers with no downtime.
- Use dedicated servers
Insufficient Customer Support
What do you do if you face a problem? You look for support. You search for consultancy services. Customer support is one of the most important components of every business organization. What if your queries about website hosting problems are not answered promptly? You will get frustrated. Same goes true for your customers. They will get frustrated once their queries are not answered timely.
Recommendations
Cheap hosting service providers do tend to fail when it comes to addressing customers concerns within adequate time. The issues may range from simple to technical. This lethargic and negligent practice often leads cheap hosting service providers to lose their potential customers. We recommend you to:
- Lookout for service providers which guarantee a competent customer support service.
- Don’t trust on cheap hosting service providers
- Check out for service providers, who ensure round-the-clock customer support service
Data security
Your identity is dear to you. Your data is dear to you as well. How would you feel if your website is hacked? What would you feel if your data is stolen? You will feel lost. Don’t you? And, you will feel ashamed and uncomfortable if your privacy is breached. One of the disadvantages of using cheap hosting service is that your website remains vulnerable to security threats.
Recommendations
Cheap hosts might not be competent to provide you with the confidentiality and privacy paradigms that you need to keep your website information intact and secure. We recommend you to:
- Investigate about secured and authenticated hosting service providers
- Read the terms and conditions written in the agreement of the hosting provider
- Ask for their backup policy
User interface
Interactive control panel and user interface (UI) are meant to facilitate you in managing your website and controlling the various real-time metrics that are really important to the over-all website performance and security.
There are very few cheap hosting service providers that are ready to help you out with your user interface. They will charge an extra amount to make your interface interactive and user friendly. Others provide run-of-the-mill solutions which are very hackable.
Recommendations
We recommend you to:
- Put your bet on one host that guarantees you to provide a full-fledge UI and control panel for your website.
- Ask your host to provide free setup and migration
Scalability
Cheap hosting has learned a new trick. They pretend to be cloud hosting providers where they claim that they would provide with scalable features. In many cases, they are lying.
Recommendations
If they have it, they will show it to you.
We recommend you to:
- Ask for a 3-day free trial
- Read terms and conditions of the service provider before signing the contract
- Check out for a host that provides optimum scalability options to manage your website traffic.
Try affordable hosting with Cloudways Click&Go
With all new Click&Go, you get all the features of an efficient and robust cloud platform where you can deploy your multiple applications with just 1-click. And, you know what! It’s light on your wallet and provides you with endless possibilities to host and manage your website, ensuring top-notch performance. All the pre-requisites of a good and affordable host, rather an economical webhost platform, are duly covered under the umbrella of Cloudways Click&Go.
With the super formula of VMAN, and other value-added features, such as s SMTP, SSL Encryption, etc., it provides you with an optimized and economical platform which gives customers the convenience and ultimate ease to concentrate on their business without bothering about their website security and backend management.
Salman Mehdi
Salman Mehdi works as Digital Content Producer for Cloudways. In his spare time, he reads books, blog posts, or anything that catches his fancy.
