When Is it Time to Change Web Hosting?
It’s funny how much real life can parallel our digital lives. We’ve all had to move—be it to a new flat or to a new house. And it’s always a pain to pack up your life and take it somewhere new. That painfulness is sometimes the only incentive needed to stay where you are, even if the ceiling leaks any time there’s a hard rain, or perhaps your next-door neighbor blares their music at all hours. The same can be said about your website hosting situation.
Sometimes it’s just easier to stay put, even if you aren’t exactly happy. And much like that flat you just begrudgingly renewed your lease on, many website hosting companies share an identical slew of problems. Must you choose from the lesser of evils, or is there an actual good hosting company?
The Fundamental Flaw with Sharing
With shared hosting, you share a chunk of space on a much larger network than you can access. If your personal web server is a slice of the pie, then the network that hosts that server is the pie itself. And the hosting company is a giant commercial bakery filled to the brim with pies and a pile of orders that it hasn’t even gotten to.
Sometimes you get lucky and your slice of pie, for no reason you can control, sits within a pie that hasn’t been divided into too many pieces. But more often than not, you’re a sliver among other slivers. And you’ll notice the effects of this—your website will load slowly, or it may not even function at all at times. It’s a frustrating problem and not one that any amount of tech support will alleviate.
Big Companies Are Often Big Targets
You’d think that with such a large operation, security would be much better. If your hosting company makes that much money, surely they’d sink more of those profits into their security architecture. That’s not always accurate—extensive hosting services tend to be the biggest target for hackers. And there is no regulatory body like the FDIC for web hosting customers. If a hacker compromises your account, there is often times not much you can do but pick up the pieces and move on. You can back up your site, but what if they compromise your users’ data? Hackers aren’t just a nuisance—depending on your business, they’re a huge liability.
So what are these big companies doing to thwart cyberattacks? However state-of-the-art their security it, they have huge targets on their back. And all a hacker has to be is one step ahead.
Suppose you don’t want to deal with using a small, lesser-known hosting company that may not be up to the challenge of hosting your business. In that case, you’ll at least want to ensure the hosting company you use has the best and most robust security available.
With Convoluted Pricing, there is Often Less than Meets the Eye
Surely, the larger the company, the cheaper its prices will be, right? On paper, it certainly would appear that way. However, many popular hosting services will obfuscate their pricing models. Similar to cellphone or cable companies, their pricing models are made to dazzle you with plain figures while hiding hidden costs or a lack of important functionality.
You’ll always need to invest in more than just their cheapest plan to get solid, reliable hosting. And they’ll know they’ll get you in the door with their prices. Once they’ve hooked you, they’re betting you’ll stay with them for convenience and simply pony up more cash to upgrade your service.
If your intention is to host your business or have any plans for increasing the scale of your product or brand, then the cheapest plan will simply not cut it. Go with the best web hosting provider that gives you feature-rich hosting for the best value right from the start rather than just finding the cheapest solution.
Customer Service is Frequently Spread Thin
The bigger the company, the more need there is for customer service. But with top web hosting services, you’re dealing with thousands of users who all require technical support. It’s so easy to buy hosting these days that anyone can do it and then turn around without a clue as to their next step. That’s when they call or email support and bottleneck the ticketing system with tedious requests while you’re waiting in line with a serious problem you’re trying to sort out.
Maybe the average American football-watcher was an untapped market for some, but you’re serious about keeping your website running, and you need real, intuitive, and fast customer support. Some serious web hosting companies care about their customers and aren’t trying to sell every single person on the planet on their service. They let their product speak for itself, and a large part of that is in their tech support.
When searching for a web hosting company, you’ll want to ensure you find a company with well-regarded customer service, as that is a huge component of what you’re paying for.
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