Here’s a few reasons why it’s better not to assume that cheaper web hosting is better web hosting.
Help!
The cheaper the account, the more likely it is to be self-service. Everything will be left in your hands, which is a huge and potentially scary responsibility.
If you don’t have the technical capabilities to handle all of the back end stuff that goes into creating and maintaining a website, you can look forward to spending hours on hold to a help desk that probably won’t understand what it is you’re asking. Some hosting services don’t offer any phone assistance at all, requiring that all communication be done through email – and online help forums can only go so far.
Being the production team, we are the ones the clients call when there’s a problem with the server they’re hosted on, and often don’t understand that there’s nothing we can do about it if we’re not the ones providing the hosting. As much as we’d love to be able to assist you, if you chose not to use us for hosting we have no access and no ability to help.
Knowing that there’s a team of people who are genuinely invested in your website whom you can go to for help is a priceless reassurance.
*Not Included.
Cheap services are cheap for a reason – mainly because you don’t get all of the options that could (and should) be available to you. The server may not be compatible with the vision you have for your website, with some hosts not even offering databases, or making them an expensive extra you have to purchase on top of the original package.
Claims of “unlimited hosting!” most likely won’t include e-mail storage, which is actually where the majority of your hosting space is taken up. The ability to store and synchronise mail across devices could also be excluded, which makes your life a lot more difficult.
While the marketing team behind these services may try and spin it as ‘simplified’ web hosting, these cut-backs actually make the job harder and greatly restrict the management and function of your website.
Similarly, updates and upgrades are not included. It’s up to you to keep on top of everything to do with your website; including security. Which leads us to our next point…
Security Breach.
If you don’t keep your security up to date, you open your website up to potential hackers, who could vandalise it or steal information from it.
And even if you do manage to keep your website secure, any number of the others hosted on that same server could be vulnerable, and hackers can easily find their way in to your site through one of those.
Because other websites using the same server may be unsavoury, you could find that the IP address you receive is black-listed for spam, meaning that you’ll have a difficult time sending mail from the site.
There is definitely not safety in numbers when it comes to web hosting.
Traffic Jam.
The cheaper a hosting service is, the more websites it’s likely to have on its servers. The more websites it hosts, the slower and more unreliable its services are going to be.
Cheap hosting has a high contention ratio, meaning that the demand for access to sites on the server is reaching or exceeding the actual amount of bandwidth available. What this does is create a bottleneck, slowing down your access and sometimes even overloading them to the point of a crash.
Just last week, a client that we’d designed a website for who went with a cheaper hosting service, only to have the entire server crash and remain offline for 6 whole days. That’s an entire working week! Imagine all of the potential business lost and all of the hassle gone through because of the poor service offered by the web hosts.
Incompetent IT.
Another bad encounter with cheap web hosting actually involved a redevelopment and a change of hosting servers.
Rhye Media were creating a new website for a client, and hosting it on a new server. While this website was being developed, their old website, on the old server, remained active and was the only version accessible to the public.
What’s good about this system is that it minimises the time your website has to be down while it’s being upgraded; when the new server is signed off, all you need to do to swap it over is go to your DNS management and change the path of your domain name.
In this instance, an IT worker prematurely changed the DNS path to the new website, completely forgetting about the mail set-up that was attached to the old one. The new website wasn’t yet set up for email, so every email sent bounced back and no one in the company was able to send or receive mail.
While we were able to fix the problem, it was obviously a hassle that we and the client shouldn’t have had to deal with.
You get what you pay for.
So even though cheaper web hosting may appear great at first glance, make sure you look a bit closer – but you’ll probably find that the insignificant amount of money you save by going with them isn’t worth all the time you’ll waste and hassles you’ll go through dealing with their poor service.
Of course, hosting doesn’t need to be – and shouldn’t be - extremely expensive, either. Check out our Hosting page for more information on the reasonably priced and reliable web hosting packages Rhye Media offers.