When it comes to managing a website, it’s essential to build a quality page and make sure your SEO is updated. However, people tend to forget the most important step of them all, and that’s choosing an excellent hosting service. No matter how well off you are or how much capital you have available for your initial investment, your eyes will eventually wander to the cheaper side of the web hosting options but is that what you want?
While you’d save some cash, maybe stop and think for a second before you make a regrettable decision that might catch up with you at a later date. Moreover, the Internet, and internet websites too, aren’t considered a ‘physical’ thing. People don’t perceive how much ‘space’ data takes up, so let’s illustrate the idea behind website hosting with a bit of a metaphor.
While your website’s very much your own after you purchase it, don’t think of it like buying a house or a car where the sole responsibility falls upon you, but rather think of website hosting as purchasing an apartment inside a building. While your apartment might be new, is your building up-to-date?
Similarly, while you might be building your website from scratch with quality programs, having a cheap web hosting service might bring significant safety and stability issues. One WordPress host that lets you keep your focus on your website and not worry about this stuff is the Managed WordPress host Templ. They are very affordable and their plans start at $15 per month. Find out more here.
So, here are the main reasons why you should avoid cheap website hosting options for your website without further ado.
Table of Contents
1. Limited or No Backups
When it comes to doing anything online, things are bound to go wrong. It isn’t brilliant to say or think otherwise. However, to limit your losses, you’d need a good backup service from a quality web host. However, you can’t expect such a service from a cheap or a free web host.
Furthermore, good hosts would offer you automatic backup every month or so, and there are even some decent budget options. When you don’t have a backup and your site breaks down, all of your hard work disappears.
Sure, having flashy programs and addons might look cool and functional, and you might focus your monetary investments into that, but at the end of the day, if you lose everything to a server issue, none of those upgrades were worth it.
2. Long Downtimes
Having a cheap hosting service also means having an affordable hosting service staff. Specifically when it comes to their technicians. After all, someone still needs to maintain servers, and if the host’s cutting corners in the price, they must be cutting corners in the quality of their employees.
You also might be thinking, well, more downtime means more free time for you, but don’t be fooled with cheap hosting. With it, your websites’ downtime can get significantly longer to a point where it’s no longer a short break time but a significant chunk of your day, preventing you from gaining any new traffic.
New traffic is significant if you’re starting an eCommerce business, as more traffic means more profit. Furthermore, there are so many factors that come to play in making a website successful.
Still, for them to be functional first, you’ll need to have your website up and running, which won’t be possible if some underpaid technician cannot keep your downtimes short.
3. Poor Security
Probably the most crucial part of your website is security. Nobody wants to visit a very unsafe place that might cost them their information, so why would you risk having your website infected with malware because the host was too cheap to upgrade their firewalls.
Also, by leaving your security in the hands of a cheap host, your website might be at risk of dangerous DDoS attacks that you’d be utterly defenseless against since your host didn’t bother to protect you from them. Moreover, having an unsecured server is akin to putting your money in a bank’s lockbox, but then the bank leaves the safe open.
One breach across any single database might lead to security breaks across the server and couple that with a bad backup policy and count your website as lost forever. If that unfortunate combination happens, you have a higher chance of finding biker mice on Mars than recovering your data.
4. Hidden Costs
In this vast online world that we call the Internet, nothing is free. So, when someone’s offering you a free hosting service, there must always be a catch. Either you’re paying for something, or you and your data are the products moved and sold.
Just like those ‘freemium’ mobile games, a lot of cheap hosting services trick you into thinking you’re getting free stuff when in reality, there are a ton of hidden costs waiting for you on the other side.
They can charge you for virtually anything and claim it was in the small print while you can’t go against them as those paid services turn out to be essential. In the end, those costs mount up to such a degree that even the most expensive option would’ve turned out cheaper.
5. Resource Limitations
Resource limitations are one of the most obvious reasons why you should avoid cheap hosting. Generally, the policy of cheap hosts is ‘less bang for more buck’, meaning that they’ll try to fit as many users onto a server as possible while at the same time leaving those servers cramped and therefore significantly slowed down.
You’ll start experiencing overloads, and you’ll have to share your collective RAM with more people. In the end, all of that will result in a worse user experience both for you as a developer and your visitors as customers. Let’s not even start how that increases the risk of crashing your site or even breaking it.
6. Inexperienced Support
Like the extended downtime issues due to underpaid or unskilled technicians, you’ll have problems with a weak support team with cheap hosts. When you pay for a premium website host, you’re also paying for a good and experienced support team that can help you troubleshoot any problems you might have.
However, you’re basically on your own; the support will either be automated and effectively useless or a couple of underpaid interns that don’t know the first thing about troubleshooting.
7. Old and Reused Hard Drives
Hard drives aren’t immortal; they break and wear down over time. So, when hard drives start degrading, well performance tends to grind to a near halt. That’s why more and more people are switching to solid-state drives.
However, it’s a different issue with servers as they use specialized hard drives that outperform your usual at-home drives. Still, the hard drives need to be replaced and updated, and since they are pretty expensive cheap hosts may decide to reuse them to save money.
Conclusion
To conclude, while you may be thinking that not splurging on a server host may save you money in the long run, the reality of it is that it just isn’t true.
Not only that, but it’ll also cost you your time and may severely impact the quality of your site and your user experience. So instead, research what host would be most suitable for you and whom you would be willing to spend your money on.
