The word cheap sounds fascinating. It pulls you more when you have just launched your online business, and you are looking for good web hosting. Web hosting is a diverse market. In your research, you will come upon various titles like cheap web hosting or best web hosting.
How Important Is Cost?
So, should the cost be a deciding factor? Well, the experienced professionals strongly disagree. Instead, multiple factors should drive your decision—uptime, support, backup facilities, speed, security, and performance.
All beginners look at the cost as a primary factor. But over time, you start realizing how flawed this approach is. You know how much things like automatic core updates, content delivery networks, and DDoS protection matter.
Why Is Cheap Web Hosting Not A Good Option In The Most Cases?
One may argue that every cheap thing is not necessarily poor in quality. Well, that makes sense. Not necessarily every reasonable thing is big-no. However, if you are also considering cheap web hosting, you are in luck to be here. We will share seven reasons why affordable options are not suitable in the web hosting industry.
-
The Server Resource Limitations
Your business needs could be vast. Unfortunately, the attractive and cheap hosting plans lack sufficient resources in most cases. These servers either use poor servers or accommodate so many websites within one server. No wonder they manage to offer lesser costs and even free plans.
Let’s take an example. A server uses 8GB. Now we allow 100 websites to use it. How much does each website get? It will be 80 MB. Well, that might be OK. But, usually, these shared servers do not hesitate to cross 100 users. That is when problems begin to emerge for every single website.
First, these websites have to face a low PHP memory limit. WordPress runs on PHP. So, WordPress fails the moment you install a new plugin or theme.
Secondly, such situations will leave you limited to a single database. It would increase the load on the database server, and the website will become slow. Generation of query results will take a longer time.
In short, you would have to bear slow speed if you go for cheap web hosting. In addition, it would hurt search engine ranking. You lose traffic when your website does not show up in search results. When you lose traffic, you lose business. It can also cause outages.
-
The Hard Drive
The prices of server hard disks are higher than desktop hard disks. Reasons are fast performance, longer lifespan, and better reliability. Yes, hard disks do have a specified lifetime. The probability of failure is always there once the time expires. Hard disk is a degradable resource. Also, after that time the hard disk starts performing lower, which is easily visible.
So what should we conclude? Yes, when that specified lifetime is over, you should discard it. As you can guess, cheap web hosts, do not do that. Sometimes, they even use desktop-level hard disks. Even worse is they keep using them even after the time is over. Market surveys show that cheap web hosts usually do not prioritize hardware upgrades.
Data is a valuable asset in the 21st century. The more significant concern is not the cost of the hard disk when it fails. What makes the situation miserable is that you lose your business data. Can you bear such a significant loss just for cheap hosting? Surely, no.
Yet, let us suppose that it happens. Would there be any way out? Yes, only saviors in those cases will be backups. You can use them to restore your data. But it would be possible if you have taken the backup yourself and saved it elsewhere. Otherwise, the backups taken by the web host would also have been stored on the hard drive. And we know that their hard drive is gone.
You Might Also Like to Read: 5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Dedicated Server Hosting
-
Limited Or No Backup At All
So just like hardware upgrades, backups are also not the priority of cheap web hosts. What makes the situation worse is most beginners are unaware of the importance of the backups.
Professional and high-quality web hosts like The Email Shop take backups on regular backups. They also retain these backups for at least up to 30 days. All good hosts offer automatic and regular backups as a standard feature. On the other hand, the chances of getting the same in cheap web hosting plans are relatively low.
Though it may not apply to every web hosting, some cheap plans offer good backups, but there are unacceptable size limitations. Also, the retainment period of backup is short. And the worst is yet to come. You may have to pay extra for these unreliable backups.
Every web administrator should learn this lesson by heart. You should always have a backup of your website. It is an essential element of the general security key list of the websites. Backup is the only solution when your website goes down.
-
Low-Quality Support
With cheap web hosts, you will not enjoy a fast response to the ticket. It will instead be too slow. You and all other web hosting clients will also be going through such issues. And things will become worse when you are told that there is no proper support software.
There are free hosting plans that contact you via email. And if you are strong enough to manage these two issues, you will realize that you do not even have any support for daily tasks. Let us say you encounter a white screen of death. You try to tackle it by increasing the PHP memory limit.
This is not rocket science, but the support staff of cheap plans cannot help you in most cases. It is also possible that they are not even willing to help you. Think what would happen if you encountered more complex and technical issues than that.
You are pretty much on your own when using cheap hosting plans. You may need help with a domain or any WordPress-related issues. Anything could happen, and you will have only two options.
First, be technical enough that you can search on Google, find relevant articles, and apply the learned knowledge safely. Secondly, you will have to hire technical experts. The former is time-taking, and the latter would cost you and turn cheap web hosting into an expensive one.
-
Longer Downtimes
So, who maintains the servers? Well, there are backend technicians who handle everything. Everything is their duty, from connecting wires to installation and security maintenance of the operating system.
Of course, these skilled server admins invest so much of their time and effort in reaching those expertise levels. So would they charge low for their services? No, they will demand high salary packages. And that will scare the cheap hosting providers away.
On the other hand, downtimes are a part of hosting life. Best hosting providers have advanced mechanisms to tackle it efficiently and reduce it to a minimum. However, if you have a c
cheap web host, you will face inadequate and sub-par server resources. Remember the hard disk issue we talked about? When you have a cheap web host, you do not get experienced technicians. That translated to long downtimes, which also are frequent.
So what makes downtime bad? Well, downtime is exactly what it sounds like. The time duration for which your website is down. The website stops functioning, and users are not able to access it. As a result, you will lose your traffic, leads, and sales. The more it prolongs, the more it destroys your business. It will push the readers away and drastically affect your SEO rankings.
-
Unreliable Security
Novices often do not give any importance to the security of their WordPress website. However, the hosting company should care about it. Are they not supposed to be the experienced ones? However, the cheap web hosts do not have strong security measures.
Some of them do not even have a basic firewall. They do not have good malware protection in place. Moreover, they do not provide any safety against DDoS attacks. As a result, your website is vulnerable to several threat actors.
The injection of malicious code is one relevant example. The process is called MySQL injection. Hackers find out some loopholes in your database first. Then, they inject the malicious code. So, in the end, your website gets infected by malware, and you do not even know. Google also marks your domain unsafe and deindexes your website. Your months of hard work are lost.
Even one malware attack can destroy all database instances of the server. It happens when the server uses a single database server with no backups. All websites using that server are compromised.
So, what does that mean? If your neighboring website is attacked, you are also not safe. Therefore, securing only your website would also not solve the problem.
How Can You Protect Your WordPress Website?
Though you may have to face the consequences of other websites facing attacks. However, here are some tips and tricks you still like to apply for safety.
You are lucky if you use WordPress. This website comes with several built-in security features. They provide a simple security checklist you can apply to enjoy good safety. Google will also tell you about the steps of this list. You have to keep core WordPress updates. Also, you must use SSL, take backups, apply limited login attempts, and add two-factor authentication.
WordPress is all about plugins and themes. There are a lot of good security plugins available in the WordPress repository. Two of them are iThemes Security Pro and JetPack Backups.
Sudden Traffic Surge
Traffic Spikes are also pretty much routine on a regular business website. Some famous person retweets your link, and it becomes viral on Reddit. All regular hosts recommend one and only one thing in such a situation. It is a resource overuse, and you should scale up your plan.
But many cheap web hosts may take unfair advantage of the situation. They may hurl the overuse notice on even a little traffic surge. If it happens two or three times, they will block your account and charge a heavy fine for opening it. That leads to the last risk of using cheap web hosting.
-
Hidden Charges
Yes, such many cheap plans just sound cheap the first time. But, they turn out to be expensive in the longer run. There are many hidden costs beneath the catchy titles of cheap or free web hosting. They are full of twists. Here are some things you may have to pay for in the form of a surprise.
- Restoring backups
- Domain transfer (a very big amount)
- Raising an escalated support ticket
- Resource overuse incident
How Much Does Cheap Hosting Cost
Nothing in life is free. The fine print is always there and the web hosting industry is no exception. There will always be hidden costs. Here are the questions you should ask your provider.
- Is it any promotional pricing?
- Will it increase after the year?
- Do I have to pay for backups?
- What about website monetization? Would it be convenient?
- Do the hosts insert their own ads?
The Final Verdict
In short, a cheap web host is a good disaster therapy in most cases. You have to be extra careful and select the host that fulfills your needs in the best way possible. The budget should never be the only parameter.
For Discount and Offers Visit our Official Twitter Page
