Blog > Businesses get what they pay for with cheap web hosting

Businesses get what they pay for with cheap web hosting

The old saying “you get what you pay for” really applies when it comes to the issue of cheap web hosting. While it’s necessary to run a company as economically as possible, web hosting isn’t a place to skimp on the necessities of doing business online.

Following is a list of things to look for when checking out cheap web hosting.

Limits on disk space or bandwidth

Say the company offers you 5 gigabytes of storage space, but limits you to uploading no more than 100KB files at a time. With these kinds of limits, there’s no way you’re ever going to get the storage space you’re buying. Also check on the amount of bandwidth you’re allowed, especially if yours is a large ecommerce site with a big database of varied products. You need to have plenty of room to exchange that information with your customers, along with space for lots of customers to come browse what you’re offering. Bandwidth limits can be even more damaging to a business web site than limit disk space, because you want to give your customers the best shopping experience possible. These limits are two of the biggest catches on cheap web hosting, so stay alert to them.

Little or no technical support

What happens when your ecommerce web site goes down at the height of your semi-annual inventory reduction sale? If there are no technicians around to tell what the problem is, you’re reduced to having to tell your angry, frustrated customers the same thing. It’s not worth saving $2 or $3 a month on web hosting if all it’s going to buy you will be disenchanted customers who won’t come back and a warehouse full of products you can’t sell.

Old, unreliable servers

While it can be hard to tell the quality of a web hosting company’s equipment without looking at it personally, there are performance measures that can give you a good idea of what’s going on, server-wise. You can always ask how old the servers are, but you may not always get a straight answer. A better way to test for sufficient equipment is to ask for the web hosting company’s rate of “uptime,” usually expressed as a percentage. The most reliable web hosting companies will have uptime rates of 99 percent or better, meaning that they’re pretty much running all the time – exactly what you want. An uptime rate of anything less than a high-90’s percentage is bad news. If you think you’re getting less-than-honest information about uptime rates from your vendor, check the vendor’s customer comments, or see if you can get in touch with another customer.

Another way to tell if a customer has unreliable equipment is to ask how many websites are hosted per server. If the company tells you anything more than about 250 sites per server, move on quickly to another vendor. Again, this is especially true if you have an information-dense website with high traffic rates.

There are cheap web hosting companies out there that provide good service. Just don’t jump at the first one that looks good.

Businesses get what they pay for with cheap web hosting7.0102