It’s Called Cheap Web Hosting for a Reason

by Jason Unger, Founder

Insights / Website Development / It’s Called Cheap Web Hosting for a Reason

There are plenty of reasons why you’d want someone managing your website – from ongoing backups to software updates to troubleshooting. But some of the biggest problems many website owners – and, in turn, we website managers – deal with today are due to their insufficient web hosts.

Every web host is different, and you can choose from a wide-range of service levels, feature sets and prices. If you want hands-on, managed hosting, that’s available. If you want reliable, mid-tier hosting, you can find it. And, if you want to spend as little as possible, there are plenty of those options, too.

Unfortunately, when it comes to deciding on a host, it’s often too easy to simply look at prices and decide to go with the cheapest option available.

Consider this a PSA: it’s called cheap web hosting for a reason.

Some things you may want to consider before you sign up with a cheap web host:

• The website you’re launching is sharing a server (computer) with tons of other sites; hundreds if not thousands of other sites are using the same server’s resources as your site
• If those sites receive an influx of traffic, it affects the load time of your site
• If those sites are hacked and malware is injected, your site could be a higher risk to be targeted
• The customer support staff at cheap web hosts tends to be outsourced and not intimately familiar (or even have a good understanding) of your site and its requirements, making troubleshooting difficult and take longer than necessary

For some folks, having a slow site and putting up with sub-par customer service is acceptable. It’s not for us, so we avoid cheap web hosts as much as possible (and are often asked to move clients from them to higher-grade companies).

Like anything in life, if you’re looking to pay the least amount of money possible, you’re likely to get service inline with your costs. Web hosting is no different. You get what you pay for.