The High Cost Of Cheap Web Hosting

By Devin | 2 comments

Don't let this happen to your business!

Imagine seeing television commercials, newspaper ads, and listening to radio commercials all week for an amazing product at a great new XYZSuperstore in town. When your impulse level has finally been raised high enough, you decide to visit the store and purchase that product. But when you drive all the way over there, you find the store is out of business and shut down! Not only are you disappointed, but now you will most likely take your business elsewhere in the future.

This same scenario can happen to your business online. You put lots of time and/or money into building a quality website and online business. Countless hours are spent optimizing and building a list of subscribers. You invest money into paid advertising to bring even more traffic to your site. Let’s face it, most of us don’t stay logged onto our website 24-7. For the typical small businesses, their site could be down for many hours or, at worst case scenario, a couple days without even knowing! Not only is that a huge immediate revenue loss, but just think about the negative image that sends to the people who tried to visit your site during that time. A negative first impression is very hard to change.

A close friend of mine used to have his site hosted on one of the big name mega hosting companies. His site gets quite a bit of traffic and is the online face of his business. He got a call from an aquaintance one Friday afternoon, “Hey pal, why doesn’t your site work?” What?!? He tries to bring his site up on his browser, but an error message says the account has been suspended! His hosting is prepaid by the year, so it can’t be for lack of payment. He checks his email and can’t find anything from his hosting company in months. His only option is to call the hosting company, but it’s after their business hours and no one answers the phone. His website site sits dead all weekend! Come Monday morning, he finds out that his FTP had been infected by a simple malware program that exploited a flaw or backdoor in his Wordpress theme. Now, the hosting company has to protect themselves of course, but instead of them simply deleting the malware, or calling him, or even emailing him, they just literally turned his business OFF without even notifying him! Luckily he didn’t have any major product launch happening at the time, but could you imagine the horrible affect that would have if it happened to your business during a time of highly expected traffic?

Dirt cheap web hosting can come at an unexpected and sometimes very costly price. In my experience, it has always been better to spend a few extra bucks on a quality company that places a high emphasis on customer service. This is especially important when your business doesn’t run without it!

Published by Devin in revenue loss, small business, web hosting