When it comes to hosting, you may be tempted to go with the cheapest option. After all, you only need a space to host your website so pending a huge amount of money to be in the same space as others doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Well, it might look like you have made the right decision, but if you are someone who values a functional website and hosting, you should aim high and not settle for a cheap host. A better idea is to try to get a good bargain from reputed hosting companies via deal websites or hosting forums. To help you understand the implication of going with a cheap host, here are five possible consequences to bear in mind:
1. Fewer Resources and Hidden Costs
Cheap hosting many times is packed with many other websites so that the owners can make good money while offering cheap hosting plans. Therefore, you will most likely experience less reliable and slower hosting service. This means your website pages will take longer to respond and load. This has a high chance of resulting in negative visitor experiences leading to poor sales. Your website ranking may also be affected.
You are also more likely to experience artificial limits and will be asked to pay more if you want to continue to enjoy more space. Most people end up paying for hidden costs they never knew about when initially signing up for cheap hosting.
2. Poor Support
People that offer cheap hosting usually have staff with lower skills and not much experience. If you encounter any challenge with your website and need some support on troubleshooting, you may not be able to get the right support as soon as you’d like. This will definitely affect your website performance. There will be no on-time security audit which is recommended to be performed on your plugins.
3. Security
One thing that users of cheap hosting usually complain about is poor security. When the servers are down (which occurs more often with cheap hosting) this results in no technology firewalls, an absence of ring-fence for the website, and certainly no suitable Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). That means your website extensions and plugins are vulnerable to attacks.
4. No Website Monitoring
With cheap hosting, you will most likely not benefit from website monitoring. You might not even be notified that your website is down unless a visitor notifies you. For a business owner, you certainly don’t want to experience this as it might cost you in sales. You could end up losing money simply because you were trying to save money by choosing cheap hosting.
5. No Backups
Every website needs to have some sort of backup plan in place. Not everyone knows how to manually backup their website and most cheap hosting plans do not offer automatic backup or an easy recovery process. That means that should anything go wrong with your website or it gets hijacked, you may not be able to recover it. If recovery is possible, you may be asked to pay more money for this service.
Now that you know some of the reasons why a cheap hosting plan is a bad idea, here is how to pick the right hosting plan for you. Look out for the following features in any hosting plan you choose to go with:
- Unlimited hosting
- Free domain
- Secure site certification
- Enhanced spam and malware protection
- Easy site builder
- Good technical support
- Scalability for easy customization
- Important Google tools
- Multiple servers for more protection
- Dependability
- Money-back guarantee
Getting all these features mentioned above may save you more money than you would have saved by going with cheap hosting. It is better to have the real deal from the beginning than getting stuck along the way and end up paying too much. The worst part is that you will have to pay for these packages individually when you could have gotten it at a cheaper price had you not put so much emphasis on getting a cheap hosting plan.
Also, getting these features does not necessarily mean that you will have to pay through the nose. There is a lot of competition and, therefore, each hosting company usually has attractive plans that offer users more options at a discounted rate. However, it is important that before you go with any hosting company, take some time and check out reviews about them. You might also want to do a Google Blog search on them as well as on social media.
Finally, your website is like your online shop, you don’t want to rush into a deal and regret it later. Take enough time to check out the hosting plan you are interested in before committing to one.