The hosting of your web site should be one of the most important decisions you make when launching your online business. After all, you will be selling on line to the public. It’s your flagship point of sale. You want to impress, you want it to be fast, you want to have optimum backend services to give your shoppers the perfect experience when they come to you.
Like absolutely everything in this world. You get what you pay for so lets get right to the point. Paying less will provide less quality. This is precisely true in the case of the web hosting market. The beginner’s in getting online often become the victim to the exaggerated advertisements promoting cheap web hosting plans.
Mistake 1. I’ve seem the advert on TV and its £1.99 a month.
Mistake 2. I will get a free domain with my hosting account.
Mistake 3. It’s got unlimited this, that and the other.
There are some very large corporations online pushing some absolutely fabulous deals. They are only fabulous if they are used for what they were designed for.
GODADDY. Will host your website for £3.99 a month and throw in a free domain name.
123-Reg. Will host your website for £2.49 a month and also throw in a free domain.
Now if you are plumber and have a three page web site, advertising your phone number. You have a couple of photos of some work you have done. Perfect.
Where do I sign?
If you are a shop owner with an ecommerce platform selling thousands of sex toys, a stock manager module for stock synchronisation, automated ordering linked to your drop shipper all managed by your all singing all dancing database. You plan to run a nice blog and write weekly. (Ring a bell?)
It’s just not going to work!
The beauty of a modern web server is you can literally pack tens of thousands of these £3 a month packages on to one machine. Its cheap for a reason. It’s crap. You are sharing the machines services and resources with thousands of other websites. These web servers are configured to be restrictive so one website cannot hog a lot of the systems and memory and in turn slow the entire machine. Its like a battle of tug and war. All the sites processes are queued, waiting on its turn to grab some data from a database, load an image, update an order. On and on it goes. It just makes things slow and even to the point where more sophisticated programs for your website will not even run.
What’s all this “unlimited” usage that everyone offers, you may ask? Very simply. You are not Amazon. You will never use a lot of data storage or bandwidth so its a clever marketing ploy to make you think its a good deal. If you read the small print, it becomes apparent very quickly that if you are a heavy user you will be told where to go soon after your usage rises. Its nonsense, unlimited is just another underhanded sales tactic because these companies know the average web site owner will get very little traffic. Don’t be fooled by it.
Another downside to these cheap packages is the “neighbourhood” you then become part of can be damaging to your business. It is well known that if your website is on the same machine as another that is being used for something unscrupulous and this is picked up by Google it can have a knock on effect to your website. At £3 a month these types of packages are magnets for everything unscrupulous.
Very seriously, you need to forget anything sub £10 a month and look for a company offering a quality business solution. Your website needs to be able to query your large database of product data quickly and wow customers with its page load time. You don’t want to be dealing with support staff trying to debug system issues when your time could be better spent taking your new online business forward. Quality professional hosting will ensure you are allocated enough power and resources to run your online business systems without worry. Do yourself a favour right at the beginning of the project and for the price of a coffee and a cake. Invest in quality.
You can view our own in house optimised business hosting packages here. If you prefer to host your web site with a third party and would like us to check the specification and quality of the package please get in touch. We are here to help and ensure your web site performs in the best possible way.