Is cheap hosting actually worth it?

What is Website Hosting?

In order for your website to appear on the internet, the files which make up your website need to be available worldwide. This involves “hosting” the files that make up your website on a server that is permanently connected to the internet. This requires a secure building to store the server, backup power, hardware costs, bandwidth costs, land costs etc. This is what hosting companies essentially do.

Storage

From our experience, businesses only need 5GB of website storage. Most hosting companies offer excessive amount of storage like 50 and 100 GB or unlimited. We find that 95% of clients never use more than 5GB of storage but don't worry as we can always upgrade your storage if requested. Unlimited may sound nice but it only adds to the cost for no reason. They can offer a large amount of cheap storage because many are located in overseas locations where the power, land and staffing are cheaper. Many also utilise older physical hard drives rather than faster solid-state storage.

Whereas our hosting that we offer is located in high security Australian DDoS protected data centres. We use solid state storage with which means your website loads in a fraction of the time and in turn it helps to improve your Google ranking.

Restricting Monthly Visits

An often missed part of cheaper hosting companies is the restriction of the number of users visiting your website per month, if too many people go to your website then the company will block any more users from viewing your website.

Australian Looking, But Not Really

Cheap hosting companies like to brand their websites to come across as Australian when actually they are situated overseas. A number of our customers have been caught by this, assuming that they are dealing with an Australian business because of the website's design.

It's not until you access support or look deeper at the ownership structure that you realise these companies are run from overseas.

Poor Customer Service

To save money on staffing, cheaper hosting will also utilise foreign call centres or outsource their support to overseas. This removes the face to face experience that some customers desire and ultimately includes the frustrating experience of waiting via live chat or phone line to solve a problem with different people, usually with the added disadvantage of communication barriers.

It's important to realise that the people you deal with at most cheap hosting have limited technical knowledge. Often they are following a troubleshooting procedure, handing you from person to person. One of our clients, with one of these cheaper hosts had the unfortunate situation of 6 phone calls over 4 hours, with over 10 different people for nothing to be fixed. After moving to Hi Tech Creative we fixed the issue in less than 1 minute.

We can offer face to face support via our offices in Mudgee and Orange and you can call our creative team at any time and you will always be talking with the same staff member.

No Assurance of Your Website’s Backups

Cheap hosting companies only do weekly backups and have no assurance of data backup. If you ask us, thats not much of a backup. The reason for this is that in many cases backups are done on the same server as the web hosting to save costs. So if the server goes down then all the files and backups of the website are gone forever!

At Hi Tech Creative, we do daily backups of your website on a separate independent server for added protection of your backups and we also provide backup restoration of your website for free if required. However many cheap hosting companies will charge extra for this service.

Limited Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is the use of specific keywords or phrases used in your website content to improve search engine rankings. Cheaper hosting companies understand that this is something that most customers want and therefore offer this as an expensive add-on or limit your ability to manipulate SEO critical information unless you pay more.

Whereas we offer no limitations and all our customers are free to edit any SEO data they need.

Long Term Contracts

While the low price can be very alluring is important to note that the advertised prices require long term contracts, often up to 10 years. Often these very generous discounts are only applied to the first year are not applied in the years after which can mean prices skyrocketing while locked in a long term contract.