When it comes to your website, there are plenty of common sense ways to cut your budget – but skimping on your web hosting is not one of them!
Your host is home to your site, which is the face of your business.
If something goes wrong with the hosting, it’s more than just a time-consuming annoyance. It can result in lost customers, lost sales, and end up costing you even more money to resolve the issues.
We understand that low cost web hosting can seem attractive when you’re building a website, but before you jump at a “bargain,” consider the hidden costs you might be incurring.
Let’s look at why you should think twice before signing up for low cost web hosting.
Why Low Cost Web Hosting Can Actually Work Out Expensive
Reduced Security
Don’t assume that your small business website won’t be a target for hackers – site attacks happen more often than you think. Low cost web hosting usually comes with reduced security measures, leaving your site vulnerable to malware and attackers.
At best, these attacks are annoying, skew your analytic data, and affect your SEO rankings. At worst, they can take your site down or compromise you and your customers’ private information and payment details.
Poor Performance
Cheap web hosting often comes with serious performance issues. More than just inconvenient for your customers, poor performance directly impacts your SEO. Page load speed is an important factor to search engines like Google, and your hosting can affect this.
Low cost web hosts usually rely on servers that use a hard disk drive or save money by putting multiple sites on a single server. Both these factors can seriously affect your site performance.
Lack of Backups
Imagine spending months creating a beautiful site only to have something go wrong and have it disappear. With a good web host, this should only be a minor problem. They will simply be able to get the site back online from the latest automatic backup file.
However, low cost web hosting may offer less frequent backups – or none at all. Of course, you can manually back it up yourself, but this can be time-consuming – especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Recovering a website that’s not adequately backed up will end up costing you time, money, and potentially lost customers.
No Monitoring
Low cost web hosting doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles – but some of those bells and whistles are worth a little extra money.
Website monitoring can be a lifesaver for many businesses. Without someone keeping tabs on the site, you might not even realise it’s down for days – or longer. Paying a little more for someone to notice when the site is down – and do something about it – can save your reputation and ensure you aren’t losing sales.
Inadequate Support
Let’s say you discover a glitch in your website or it stops working altogether. Do you have the skills to find out what went wrong and fix it? Chances are, even with the help of Google, you’ll spend hours or days trying to get your site up and running again – if you can at all.
Cheap hosting doesn’t tend to include skilled technicians available to help you troubleshoot at any time of night or day. You either have to figure it out alone or pay someone else to help you out. Either way, you’re not getting the value you thought you would from your low cost web hosting.
Limited Scalability
A basic hosting plan may work for you when you first build your website, but as your business grows, you’ll need your site to evolve along with it. In some cases, you will be able to upgrade your plan to allow for increased traffic and extra features.
But not all low cost web hosting is scalable. You might eventually have to switch hosts, which can be a time-consuming and expensive process.
The Hidden Costs Of Low Cost Web Hosting
Often, if something comes at a price that seems too good to be true, it probably is. If your hosting service is an absolute bargain, ask yourself what the catch is. Will you be missing out on some of those vital factors mentioned above, or are their hidden costs in the small print that you haven’t factored in?
Remember that time is money. You may end up spending precious hours dealing with downtime or poor performance. Or you may lose customers or sales due to your choice of host.
Your website is the face of your business, and it needs protecting and maintaining. If you’d like some support to choose the right host or ensure your site is running smoothly, contact the Website Guardians today.