I have been working with a lot of small businesses and startups. The main concern they have is the cost of the underlying infrastructure in order to save money. But most of the time I’ve seen the decision-makers in this company’s only factor be the cost they are paying up front. Most of these companies do not consider the opportunity cost or the opportunity losses which they have.
In this article, I will address why budget hosting is more expensive in the long-term and why getting a premium hosting is cheaper. When you are already using budget hosting or searching for new cheaper hosting solutions you are well aware of how these hosting companies have hidden costs and throttle your traffic at peak times when you are getting your business.
The Unexpected Costs of Budget Web Hosting
Slow Load Times and Leading to Poor Searching Rankings
I have covered this extensively as to why having a fast web server improves your search ranking. Most people fail to understand that Google will penalize websites with slower response times.
When you do a quick search on the internet or social media and other forums one of the clear reasons why people complain and are moving out is because of slow load time.
40% of your customers will abandon your site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Let me put it in a different context for you for example if you are running your blog where one of your primary sources of income is affiliate commissions. Now what happens is that when your website is slow people will come to your website and they will go away without the page being able to load. This means that you have lost a potential revenue (opportunity loss) where a person could have clicked on your affiliate link helping you to generate that affiliate commission. Not only that your ranking will drop on Google with a slow website which will lead to a decrease in traffic. This traffic could have come to you but now it is going to your competitor who is having a better ranking than you.
Inadequate Data Storage and Bandwidth Space
Recently my team was migrating a website from a budget hosting provider and every time they were FTP into the server to transfer the files, the provider will throttle the website speed or even at times the website didn’t load. On discovery we figured out that the bandwidth the whole server had was 100mbps – across all the accounts on that server. Today even mobile phones have speeds up to 50 Mbps. With more than 50% of traffic coming from mobiles 100 Mbps will not cut it and to throttle a website just because data transfer is happening – which means that you will lose your traffic and potential customers.
When hosting providers claim unlimited storage common sense tells us there is nothing like unlimited storage it just that the limit of the storage is hidden somewhere deep inside the legal documents. This is when customers are caught unaware and when they breach the storage limits their accounts get suspended forcing them to buy extremely expensive upgrades even if they want to move out from there.
Poor Infrastructure
The quality of hosting is based on the underlying infrastructure it owns. Having a poor infrastructure is the only way that they can make their hosting cheaper. Most of the budget providers don’t have 1gbps on their servers leave alone 10 Gbps speed. With poor infrastructure problems like downtime and speed are very common. I was pitching to the client to move from a budget hosting provider to us. one of the questions they asked me was how much downtime do we get every week. It took me a while to understand that downtime doesn’t exist in our dictionary. Since we started 4 years ago we have got zero downtime on our servers.
Not only speed but when you are having downtime on your website you are losing customers coming to your website and you are losing search engines coming to the website to crawl it. Everyone must be aware of the famous outage at “a small orange” over the Christmas week full stop. It took them over 10 days to get everyone online and being Christmas week all the E-Commerce companies suffered massive losses because their site was not available.
Another common thing that we have observed in the hosting industry, in order to save cost the servers are oversold i.e. selling more than the actual capacity of the server. This leads to extremely poor performance during peak hours.
Poor Customer Service
Cheap hosting companies run out of the garage or there’s something just a one-man show. which means they cannot service their customers 24/7. I do vividly remember and an incident when one of my clients bought cheap hosting from eBay and on further discovery during the migration to us we figured out he was actually one guy having a couple of servers and for the support, it always has been voicemails – no chat or email responses were severely delayed sometimes even over 48Hrs.
Not all small providers are cheap hosting but there are also some large companies and brands that provide budget hosting. When it comes to such large brands; to ensure that they are profitable, the cost-cutting will start at support & technical staff. Giving you very poor technical support.
In fact, in my opinion, if a customer does not need to open a support ticket means the hosting provider is good.
Increased Chance of Becoming Spam
When it comes to budget hosting chances of your website or your domain becoming spam a much higher. As mentioned above a lot of budget hosting providers oversell their capacities. Poor quality server configuration and oversold capacities Will definitely lead to your domain becoming spam. This will lead to loss of reputation and goodwill of a website. So generally what people will do is set up a free email for the business on Yahoo/Gmail and will use that. Using such free email services does not create authenticity for the business which will further harm the reputation of your website.
No Backup Plan
When it comes to backups it is not just the backup of your file but also the redundancy of hardware. For instance, none of the budget and cheap hosting providers will ever give you RAID10 on storage. Their infrastructure will not be redundant i.e. having a backup switch or a firewall etc. What I’ve seen in the hosting industry cheap hosting providers will just get dedicated servers with cPanel and start reselling their services. Not really creating value or trying to provide a stable infrastructure to the clients.
industry being the way it is, having a backup plan is way out of question. Only a few reputable hosting providers will actually give your backup plan.
Without any redundancy, in place, your site can be done for weeks and we have seen this with multiple bigger brands also where the websites are going down for weeks together. Let me narrate a story for you. We had a client who approached us Because his eCommerce website had been down for over four days. The Black Friday and Cyber Monday were just around the corner and he was losing business every hour. So what we did was quickly created a lighter version of his website with only high selling products and got it live. We further created a redirect from his main website to the light version of the website. The redirect was created so that SEO traffic that we were getting is not lost. And in the meanwhile, after the budget provider got the server ready we migrated his main website to our infrastructure. It has been over three years and the client has never looked back.
Why Select Geek Crunch Hosting?
World Class Infrastructure
Geek Crunch Hosting enables you to get more choice of deployment options for every workload need with
- 73+ Datacenters
- 90+ POPs Around The World
- 28+ Metropolitan Markets
- 99.999% Network Uptime
- 10+ TBPS Bandwidth capacity
- 2000+ ISPs Peered with
- 10 GE & 100 GE uplinks
- 10GBPS network connection
Know more about GCH Datacenters
Extensive Automation
Our business model uses an automated platform to deploy servers, update software, configure routers, and perform hundreds of other routine tasks with speed and precision, efficient and cost-reducing.
Ultimate Security
Cutting edge technology and up-to-date implementations make our servers bulletproof against all common and rare threats. Rely on advanced security infrastructure and latest security patches for a fully protected website.
Flexible Contract Options
Various alternatives, flexible billing. We offer our services on various contractual needs. Whether its Monthly, Yearly or beyond. We are happy to work out an optimal solution for you.
Expert Support In-House Support
We’re on your issues the moment you contact us – sometimes before. One point of contact is all it takes. We start working and we won’t stop until you’re happy. We solve your problems swiftly.
Service Beyond Support means that our entire team is invested in creating a better experience for your business. Have an issue? Have a question? Need someone to bounce an idea off? For us, service is much bigger than support. It starts before you are a customer and transcends the typical structure for something better. We have a team of knowledgeable staff and engineers available 24/7/365 to help you with whatever you may need. We do not outsource our support to any third parties, so you will always be in contact with one of our staff members.
Powered by GCH Cloud Platform
In order to provide more stable and secure services, all our Hosting is powered by GCH Cloud Platform. Our infrastructure is built on top of virtual machines (GCH Cloud Compute + GCH Cloud Storage), instead of bare metal servers, giving you higher I/O and better performance. Launching a new VM’s is a much faster and efficient process. Scaling resources such as CPU, RAM, and storage are also much easier. This allows us to achieve high-performance hosting.
Fastest Page Load time
High Performance hosting that Improves your page load time which is a very important feature for any website. Geek crunch hosting provides you a minimum page load time of only a few ms.
Conclusion
It’s always better to choose your hosting provider very wisely. When you opt for a cheap hosting service, you may think that it will cost less than compared to other hosting providers, but in the long run it will definitely hit you on the bottom line of your business. Also cheap hosting never lets you achieve the speed, performance & security that is required to run your business successfully.
When you choose a high performance hosting provider, they will make sure that your website is up and running all the time without any issues, providing you maximum uptime, performance, and security which is required. Choosing a high performance hosting provider will help you to focus more on your business as you don’t have to worry about any issues with the server or your website as all the technical aspects are being taken care of by highly professionals and dedicated experts.
As a website owner, it’s your decision whether you would like to put your data at risk by hosting your website with a cheap hosting provider or get a high performance hosting solution for your business that helps you to stay ahead of the curve.
No Comments - be the first.