What are the dangers of cheap hosting?
For many clients, the issue of hosting is either too technical or too boring to be of any real interest. In reality, hosting has a massive impact on your website, your business and your bottom line.
Clients are often tempted to opt for the cheapest hosting package on the assumption that all host companies offer a similar product. Wrong.
Try and liken a hosting provider to a petrol station. Unless you know exactly how your engine works, you would buy from the one selling the cheapest product. The comparison works for a few important reasons:
- Working with a hosting provider is a relationship, because you will depend on the provider to support your website round-the-clock. Petrol stations just sell stuff that makes your car go.
- Unless you buy from a supermarket pump, you can be assured of the brand of the petrol you buy and you need only select unleaded or super-unleaded. The quality of the hosting service depends on a large number of factors such as bandwidth (how much traffic your website can receive), uptime (the proportion of time that your website is available) and support (the service you receive when a system fails). Petrol does more than make your car go.
- Hosting is a technical subject, and it can be hard to differentiate the important facts from the marketing spin. Petrol is also a complicated subject, but only if you care what it does to your engine.
Price is important, but there isn’t really a one-size-fits-all hosting solution, so comparing costs alone won’t really help. You need to make sure that your website is supported by the most appropriate hosting for you.
Cheap hosting very often is just that and unfortunately, when things go wrong, the savings you’ve made are wiped out in seconds with either lost sales or expensive costs to resolve the issues.
What’s the problem with budget hosting?
With unreliability comes downtime, and with downtime comes cost. How much does it cost you if your website is broken?
For example, a company we know chose to save £100 a month by opting for a cheap hosting provider. Over Christmas their hosting failed and their website was offline for three days.
Total savings: £1200 per annum.
Total cost of three days’ downtime:
£10,000 in lost sales
+ £1000 in wasted advertising spend
+ £1000 to resolve the issue
+ £? In brand value
What made this incident worse was that it caused them to miss the Boxing Day sales which would have accounted for a large proportion of their yearly revenue. On the scale of things the problems they experienced were actually pretty minor (no data was lost) but even so the pain was substantial!
The hidden X factor
From experience a hard lesson I’ve learnt is that ‘technical support’ is often the hidden quantity in hosting. It’s the X factor that makes all the difference because… It really matters when you need it.
Budget hosting providers will often have long call-waiting times going through to a call-centre of front-line support staff who have limited technical experience or skills.
Much better to be on first name terms with your support team – to pick-up the phone and say: “Mark, I have a serious problem can you pull out all the stosp on this one?”
A simple test of the support quality can be to call their technical support team before you buy anything. Typically sales calls can be answered within two seconds and support calls within 10 minutes!
What can you do?
Check with your hosting provider. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Ask about the datacentre (the building where your server lives), average uptime, hardware replacement time and when they have support technicians on-site.
It’s also a good idea to chat with your web agency. Most will have a preferred hosting provider or will be able to put a solution together for you.
