Why Cheap Website Hosting Is Bad for Your Business Website

Introduction

After investing your allowed budget on your new business website, it might be tempting to cut any further expenses by choosing the cheapest web hosting from the numerous search results. Your online business success greatly depends on the right web host choice. Just as it's senseless to construct a high-end house on a tract of swampland, a cheaply-run web host could prove detrimental to your site in the long run.

Consequences of Cheap Web Hosting

Cheap hosting could result in:

• Poor performance and slow runtime
• Too much downtime
• Visitors unable to reach your site
• Little to no customer support
• Unknowledgeable customer support
• Poor security protection
• Negative effects on your site traffic
• Affecting your SEO ranking
• Few to no backups
• Poor security protection
• A blacklisted IP

Traits of a Good Hosting Service

What to look for in a good web host:

• Good performance and runtime
• High percentage of uptime
• Accessible and knowledgeable customer service
• Automatic backups kept on a separate server
• Great security protection
• A clean, not blacklisted, IP
• Good value for the price
• Hosting packages that avoid surprise charges

How to Find a Good Web Host

Before you commit to a purchase, compare the prices and features of various hosts. Also, research online reviews and, if possible, personally contact one or two persons who have hosting services with these providers.

A good host will have accessible customer support through chats, tickets, emails, and calls. However, if you have problems reaching support during your research stage, it's not likely customer support will improve after you become a customer.

Evaluate whether the potential hosting company's prices are too expensive or too cheap for your hosting plan choice. When comparing, it's ideal to eliminate those on each end of the spectrum offering the highest and lowest prices. Those with the cheapest prices, such as under a dollar per month, are prone to have overloaded servers. Hosts with the highest prices should be avoided as well unless they have a package with deluxe features and tech support to bring value to this additional cost. If a low price is promo pricing that increases to non-promo pricing upon your next renewal, use the non-promo pricing for your evaluation.

Look for potential hidden costs. There could be hidden costs in upgrades to web security, increased performance to your site, tech support, or website backups. No matter which hosting company you choose, it's crucial to make routine site backups. Should your hosting company store automatic backups on the same server and crash, not just your website but your backup will be lost. Even though the company might keep backups on a separate server, if you don't have a premium plan to include free site restoration, there may be an additional cost for restoration should something happen to your site.

Watch out for overselling tactics. Some host companies assume their clients will only use a fraction of bandwidth and disk space allocated in their clients' plans. These companies are basically selling more bandwidth and disk space than they can provide, anticipating the unused portions will make up for this. Yet, in their Terms of Service fine print, they state they can terminate your account if your disk space goes over their allotted threshold, which is way below the amount promised. When they suddenly terminate your account, you've lost your website, email, and any backups-all without explanation or refund compensation.

A good host will not have a blacklisted IP. A blacklisted IP not only affects the host's reputation but any email addresses hosted through it. This means any email sent through your own domain may be blacklisted as well and blocked by your recipient's email provider. To ensure your potential host's address has not been blacklisted, ask your potential host for their IP address before signing up with them and search that IP at Spam Haus.

Regularly monitor your site's speed and uptime. This means the time your site is up and accessible to visitors. If a host is good, it will guarantee a high percentage of uptime per day. Nevertheless, even with a guarantee, you should still keep track of your speed and uptime numbers. If these numbers don't meet the guaranteed speed and uptime, you can request compensation. Cheap web hosting usually means server problems with shared hosting. Bandwidth is limited due to multiple website accounts sharing space on the same server. If one website experiences too much traffic, it will affect the speed and uptime/downtime of other websites sharing space on the server.

Remember that page speed plays a factor in Google's search rankings, especially for searches on mobile devices. A slow website can cost you through negative SEO and webpage ranking.

Where to go to track your site's speed:  Bitcatcha, UpTrends, and GtMetrix.

Where to go to track your site's uptime: Pingdom, Uptime Robot, and Host Tracker.

Don't forget about security. Unlike quality hosting, there's no security guarantee with cheap hosting. Your site is exposed to threats such as security defects and viruses. Security is further weakened with the server hosting multiple websites and no firewall. No matter how much security protection you might invest in your site, it's still vulnerable to attacks without a secure server.

Conclusion

Remember the adage: you get what you pay for.