7 Reasons To Avoid Cheap Website Hosting Providers

Some things are worth paying a bit extra for. The importance of choosing the right hosting provider to host your website is now more important than ever.

There are plenty of hosting providers around. But selecting a server to host your website because they are the cheapest, is definitely not recommended.

I regularly take on projects involving redesigning websites. Taking over and revamping old sites that have been online for many years but aren’t performing well. This is usually when I have to deal with inadequate website hosting servers. The website lives on one of those cheap & nasty servers that simply doesn’t deliver.

7 Reasons Why You Should Not Use Cheap Web Hosting Servers

1. Slow Load Speed.

This is not only frustrating for the end user, but will return a negative ranking score on the major search engines.

There are many techniques that can be used to improve page load speed. Such as trimming image sizes and removing unnecessary plugins. However if the server is slow, making these changes will make very little difference.

2. Downtime & Busy Times

Using shared cloud hosting servers will result in more downtime. If there are other sites on your shared cloud server that are experiencing problems or high traffic, this will result in your site not loading or loading even slower.

Premium and reputable servers do experience downtime as well. But on the odd occasion that this happens, you will be notified on the interruption to service and have confidence that the tech teams are working hard to quickly resolve issues.

3. Technical Support

The cheap and nasty hosting servers generally have poor customer support. When your website goes offline or worse, gets compromised (hacked) you need to be able to sort this quickly.

The cheap providers generally have a very slow response time when you have raised a support ticket. Furthermore many will charge additional fees for additional support.

Paying a little more for a premium service means that this support is available quickly and inclusively.

A good web hosting company is one that has a technician available either on the telephone or via live chat whenever problems arise.

4. GDPR & Security Worries

It is unthinkable to host an E Commerce (online shop) site on a cheap server.

If the server security is breached, all of your customer details could be leaked. This is serious.

GDPR – It is your responsibility to protect your customers data.

Allowing your customer’s personal details to be leaked is simply unacceptable and will result in hefty fines for breach of GDPR rules.

Additionally this could be catastrophic for your brand’s reputation.

This also applies if you use newsletter software from your site.

5. Poor Back-end Interface & Options

The cheap servers don’t give us the right tools to work with behind the scenes of the website. A piece of software called cPanel is now industry standard which allows us to control all kinds of options when building & maintaining the site. Many of the cheap servers simply don’t include this. Instead they offer basic additional options as addons that they charge for.

These back-end options include email configuration for your domain, managing addon domains, SSL encryption, working with MySQL databases and much more.

6. Stats

The cPanel software mentioned above includes statistical monitoring tools.

In order to improve the website’s productivity, we have to monitor the stats.

Detailed stats show us how the site is performing. How many more unique views the site is gaining and also which pages and keywords are performing best.

These tools are crucial to running a successful website. The cheap & nasty hosting providers do not offer these tools.

7. Limited Resources

Cheap servers will limit the resources that are available to your website. These resources include limited bandwidth, disk space, CPU, databases, RAM… the list goes on.

Using a cheap server is like using a cheap laptop.

Imagine or compare this to using a cheap, bottom-of-the-range laptop. Slow to load. Frustrating to work with. Just rubbish all round performance. All because you saved a few £’s when you went shopping for it.

What Server Do I Recommend?

I have tried countless different servers back in the early days of website design.

Eventually I discovered a UK based hosting company called Blackfoot. They were able to deliver the quality and more importantly, the customer support that I required. So I stuck with them. I recommended all of my clients to use this service or switch over to them.

The company was later acquired by Krystal Hosting. When this takeover acquisition occurred, I had to reassess the service that I was being provided having recommended this to so many.

I am pleased to say that the service that I, and my clients receive from Krystal Hostin g has been flawless. I am delighted with their service and technical support.

There may be cheaper options out there… but web hosting is definitely one of those things that is worth spending a little more on.