Cheap is not always best…
As admin of a popular Facebook business group (11,000 plus members) I see a lot of requests for cheap hosting.
I see a lot of requests for cheap everything to be honest…
Now – there are some areas in business where you can argue that “cost effective” or “reasonably priced” services are absolutely fine – I’m perfectly happy to use cheap paper in my printer for instance as its generally only for my own use.
BUT cheap hosting is cheap for a reason….you are sharing the server your site sits on with thousands of others. So what you might say? After all a seat on a train is a lot cheaper than a personal chauffeur but you get to the same destination….
Well – having thousands of other people in the same server space can result in
1. Your site being slow to load
2. A higher risk of your site being hacked – if one site gets hacked on the server there’s a possibility that many of the sites can be infected.
If you’ve invested time and money in your site then the last thing you want is for people to be frustrated at its load time. We now all have the attention span of a goldfish! If your site doesn’t load in three seconds or less you can lose 50% of your potential audience! Not to mention Google not liking slow loading sites!
If your site gets hacked via the server that causes all sorts of distress and time in getting it back online – not to mention potential loss of revenue.
So – when you make a decision on your hosting – don’t always go with the cheapest.
Here’s a few questions you might want to ask the supplier.
1. How many sites will be on the server?
2. Where are the servers based? Many companies have servers in the US – which due to the time difference means their regular maintenance slots will generally be when you want your clients to be accessing your site and again this could produce slow load times. It will also have an affect on support times available to you.
3. What is the response time should there be an issue with your site? Ideally you want to get a response within a few hours and a resolution of the problem within 24! Make sure the company you go with can offer this service.
4. Do I get a back up service and if so how often? Many cheap hosting offers expect you to have back ups
Beware claims of 100% uptime – thats actually impossible – all hosting companies will experience downtime at some point!
Remember – as with most things you get what you pay for – and in the hosting world that is so true!
At Square One we are a hosting reseller. The company we use resides in the UK and we have no more than 50 sites on our servers at any one time! We respond to hosting queries within the hour and they are usually fixed in a couple of hours – in fact we monitor all our sites and usually know if they are down before the client! All sites have daily back up. But then we don’t provide “cheap hosting”….