The dangers of cheap web hosting
Few things have such a great potential to ruin your online business than your web hosting. Most website owners have at some point had to go through the stress of their website going down. As to how easy or difficult it is to reinstate your website depends largely on your hosting company. There are literally thousand of web companies out there and they vary greatly in price. Some prefer to go with cheaper companies to save a few pounds a year but in this blog post I argue the case for pushing the boat out a little as spending a little bit extra can save you a lot of headaches.
So, what are the dangers of cheap web hosting?
More frequent downtime
Cheap hosting packages mean there are less people to monitor the resources and this means your server and therefore your website is more likely to go down.
Oversold servers
Unless you have a dedicated server (a package where you lease the entire server meaning no one else is using it) your site will rung along site a number of other websites. Cheaper hosting companies have less stringent policies on how many sites they run on a server at any one time. The result is they run slowly as they try to do a lot of things at once.
Slow, unreliable support
Websites run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So nine-to-five support is no good to you. Cheaper hosting companies often limit the time their help desk is open to save money. Furthermore, some do not offer telephone support to reduce their running costs.
Overseas servers and support
It’s more costly to run a server in the UK than it is in many other countries. Some companies save money by housing their servers and their support team overseas. This causes two problem: the support team may not speak the same languages as you and having a site on an overseas server may interfere with your search engine rankings.
Of course, this post is not saying that all cheap hosting companies are bad and all expensive ones are perfect—or that there is always a correlation between what you spend and the quality of service. The important point is that if a company seems unusually cheap, you should exercise caution. A quick search online will no doubt reveal reviews that show how good or bad they are.
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