You had to fight to get the shoestring marketing budget you have now. You’re cutting back by staying up late to write your own web copy and build your own website. So, you may also be tempted to go with the cheapest host you can find. But, this is not an area where you want to try to cut costs. A little bit of money saved today can actually end up costing you thousands of dollars down the line. Cheap hosting can actually kill a startup business completely.
Spending a little bit more money gets you a lot more value. For example, HostPapa has lots of options that are only slightly more than our “cheap” competitors, but give you considerably more reliability and scalability
How bad can cheap hosting really be? Here are the hidden costs.
Your Traffic is Capped and Speeds are Throttled
To be blunt, cheap hosting providers do not expect you to get much traffic, nor are they prepared to handle it.
If your traffic sees a major uptick and you start to see some traction, you may notice that your cheap host puts an end to that by throttling your site’s speeds. There goes all of your momentum.
You worked so hard to get visitors to your site, but now they’re leaving because most people won’t wait for 3 seconds for a web page to load. Your host is deliberately slowing you down because they’re not built for you to succeed.
Now, any online marketing campaigns such as social ads or pay-per-clicks ads are sabotaged when people get stuck on a loading screen for your landing page.
You Will Experience Frequent (and Unreported Outages)
This may have been a concession you made ahead of time when you decided to go with a cheaper host. “Sure, we’ll experience a bit more downtime. But how bad can it be?”[adsense]
Think about what’s at stake here. The difference between 99.671% uptime and 99.995% uptime is the difference between over 20 hours of downtime per year and 20 minutes of downtime per year. And to be clear, no cheap host can reasonably promise you 99.995% of uptime.
Even if they promise you those rates, they’re not factoring in the slowed down and truncated speeds that we just mentioned above. They will count that as uptime, but you might as well be down because your site is (deliberately) slow.
Switching is a Nightmare
Sure, the baseline packages aren’t built for traffic, but you can easily upgrade to their next tier of hosting, right? Wrong. Upgrading with a cheap provider is notoriously complex and can take weeks.
If that’s the case, you can simply change hosting providers when your traffic reaches a certain point, right? Wrong, again. These moves are extremely frustrating, take much longer than promised and can result in a ton of downtime.
In short, setting your site up on a cheap host is setting it up to fail. This is a massively important decision that can literally make or break your digital marketing efforts for the next year or so.
Make the right choice. Choose proven and reliable hosting for your business and you will easily see a return on investment with faster speeds, unencumbered uptime, and scalability to match your business’ growth.
