The perils of cheap web hosting

When god built the internet, God said, ‘go forth and multiply’ and a thousand hosting providers were born! A thousand is in fact an understatement these days, when everyone and their dog can own a web hosting business in minutes, thanks to web hosting affiliates. The price war this has brought about is amazing. Hosting can be had for ridiculously cheap monthly rates. You can have your own space on the World Wide Web for 1 whole month, for less than the cost of a Big Mac with fries!

The downside to this is, that there are so many part time operators that you cannot easily decide on who the good ones are. While cheap web hosting that costs you $4 to $5 might work perfectly for personal websites, when you plan on running your online business or someone else’s business website it is usually a better bet to go with the more expensive services, though this is not necessarily true all of the time.

Here are some reasons why a more expensive service is likely to be better,

1. When a host charges more for their services, they would very likely have more cash for the maintenance of their servers, the ability to hire reliable and efficient customer support and troubleshooting staff and therefore provide a better overall user experience.

2. If they have been operating for a few years, they would necessarily have had to provide excellent service to have survived in the competitive web hosting business

However one should not totally thrash cheap web hosts. After all, they have enabled millions of web users with limited resources, to have their own space on the internet and contribute to the internet phenomenon in their own personal way. Cheap web hosting solely for cost cutting sake however is not a good idea for business users and can lead to many problems that can adversely affect your business online. With very fickle internet audiences and the information overload accessible with a simple search button, a stable web host and a perfect user experience for your visitors is all the more important. After all, you would not build a skyscraper on a foundation for a single storey home just to cut costs would you?
Here are a few ways opting for cheap web hosting just for the sake of cost cutting, can lead to disaster for your business.

Halting performance: With the variety of graphics heavy web content online today including streaming media and the ubiquitous flash, it is very likely that you might consider using these in your website. Your server speed or performance is the determining factor in whether your visitors get a satisfying experience at your site or not. If your site takes too long too load, it is likely that you will lose visitors to your rival with the faster servers! When a web host cuts costs, it is very likely they overload their servers with as many users as possible. Heavy activity on someone else’s site on your server can drastically affect the speed at which your content is served.

Spotty uptime: You spend a lot of time promoting your website buying hundreds of links, flogging myspace and friendster, you are building your reputation and then one day you get the frustrating ‘site not available’ message just when your traffic hits an all time high. A night of celebration turns into a night of endless emails to your web host who never answers on time because they are located on the exact opposite side of the earth from you. The culprit here is severely restricted bandwidth, once again due to server overload. A sudden spike in visitors to your website can cause the server to exceed its available bandwidth leaving you offline, while yet again your competitor will play host to your visitors.

Annoying support: Hosting a website can be a complex task for most individuals, unless you an experienced webmaster. It is very likely that you will come up with a host of issues relating to setting up your site, installing new applications, strange error messages, database problems, etc Unless there is knowledgeable support available at all times you are going to get bogged down at times and in business time lost is money lost. Competent support becomes all the more important when your site is facing downtime as visitors can be put off when they visit a site for the first time and its offline. It is likely they will never visit again. When you own a membership site again, quick resolution to server problems is imperative as your members are paying for their online experience.

It surely pays to take some time to study your web host, before taking the plunge. Choosing a cheap web host just because it costs less than the others is a bad decision. It is worth doing a little investigation at the start to determine the right host for your needs at a realistic price to save you a world of headache later.

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