Is Cheap Website Hosting Costing Your Business New Clients?

Is cheap hosting really saving you money?

The most common question we get asked by our customers is “is cheap hosting any good?”.

Well, the answer to that question depends on what you are looking for when you choose a hosting package for your business.

Large companies such as GoDaddy and Fasthosts offer hosting packages starting from as little as £1 a year. These offerings include a huge list of features from hosting to email accounts and website-building tools.

Unfortunately, the real cost to your business will surprise you.

Cheap Web Hosting – The real cost of paying too little.

When using cheap web hosting services there’s a higher price that your business will be paying every single day.

When it comes to web hosting you really do get what you pay for:

1. Cheap hosting means your website can be hosted on shared servers with hundreds if not thousands of other websites. This will affect speed and performance dramatically and limit the options available when building your new website.
2. Your email accounts send messages using shared email servers. This can cause delivery issues if another customer is flagged for sending spam emails.
3. Your website is of course your own responsibility. You are paying for hosting not website support. Two different things altogether.
4. You will need to call a call centre if you have a technical issue. It can take a long time to get to the front of the queue and then you are dealing with a support representative reading a script rather than having technical knowledge of your specific website.
5. Due to the heavy load on shared servers, your site visitors can experience slow performance. This will increase the chances that your potential customer will move on to a competitor’s faster site. Also, search engines do not like slow sites for this very reason which could affect your search rankings.
6. We have seen sites deleted without warning if hacking is detected, again this is your responsibility to recover.
7. Also, the hosting provider does not offer training on how to use the hundreds of software products ‘bundled’ into the hosting service, they will also not be able to advise on the website you are hosting with them as they are not website developers.
8. As you are paying such a low price for your hosting, providers are more likely to ask you to move to another host if you are having issues that their support team cannot handle.

When choosing a hosting provider look beyond the monthly cost and ask yourself what you plan to do with the hosting package you are purchasing. If you are running a business your website represents you and helps you to gain new customers.

Quality Website Hosting – What to look for from a good website host

Look for the following when choosing a hosting provider for your business:

1. Does the company offer email or telephone support and what is the response time?
2. Does the company host their own website using the packages they sell to its customers?
3. Is your website going to be sharing space with other sites? If so how many?
4. Does the hosting provider build websites or server networks? If a company has experience in building and hosting websites it should be able to fix common problems quickly and efficiently.
5. Does your hosting provider offer products to protect you from potential hacking threats?
6. Does your host offer training on website, email and SEO systems to support your business website needs?

Is Cheap Hosting Costing Your Business more than you think? – Conclusions

Ultimately as a business owner, you can choose a cheap hosting provider to host your business website and email service, but ask yourself these questions before you decide:

1. Will potential customers be impressed by a slow or broken website?
2. How will your business communicate with new or existing customers if our emails are marked as spam?
3. If your website is attacked or hacked how will this affect your business?

We feel as web designers and support providers ourselves that a support and hosting package is an insurance policy for your business website.

Purchasing a best-in-class hosting support service is essential and the piece of mind that your website will continue to run smoothly and generate new customers as it was designed to do is exactly what you are paying for.

Is your business really only worth £1?

To find out more about our support packages visit our support and hosting page.