Hosting is a fee you pay monthly or annually to keep your website on a server, connected to the internet.
I’m sometimes asked why we’re more expensive than the cheap hosting providers.
You may think that our server is a bit like a brick – that it just sits there. Well, not quite! There’s a big difference between cheap web hosting and quality web hosting.
Here’s why…
Why Cheap Web Hosting Sucks
I’ve rescued clients from cheap hosting a few times now. Personally, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole!
Cheap web hosting crams lots of websites onto a single server. The business model requires quantity, not quality.
Poor Security
The biggest problem with cheap hosting is poor security. Web servers can be targeted with thousands of attacks per hour. Once your website has been breached, a hacker can embed spam links on your pages, distribute evil software (like viruses) via your website, or publish their own content eg political or terrorist propaganda.
Your domain could be blacklisted and your business damaged.
Don’t think that you’re immune. I’ve seen clients get hacked!
And That’s Not All
With free and cheap web hosting you might also suffer from:
- Slow load time. If your website doesn’t load within a few seconds, visitors will abandon it before they read a word.
- Poor support, if any
- Having your website shut down for the rest of the month if it receives too much traffic. Ouch!
- Page load errors if you receive too much traffic
- No backups. You could lose the lot.
- A loss of intellectual property (you might have signed your rights away)
- A greater danger that the hosting company will go out of business
- Annoying marketing emails from the hosting company
- Poor Google ranking – because Google isn’t taking your website seriously.
- Reduced credibility in the business world – because no one else is taking your website seriously either.
- Not being able to have your own domain name. For instance you might be stuck with a domain name like mybusiness.freehosting.com.
- Losing inbound traffic if you switch hosts (You can take your traffic with you if you pay for shared web hosting and a domain name)
- Ads on your website – unless you pay to turn them off.
- Not being allowed to display your own ads on your own site
- No FTP (the software that allows you to upload and download files from your hosting account)
- A time limit on the free hosting – then you have to pay
- Hidden costs
You may think that none of this will happen to you – but I’ve seen it firsthand. As a web designer, I feel responsible for steering my clients in the right direction. I can’t, in all good faith, recommend free or cheap hosting.
Conclusion
Free / cheap hosting is a problem waiting to happen. Use it for your hobbies – not a serious business.
Quality Website Hosting
At Webhive we spend a lot of time looking after your hosting – applying updates, keeping it secure, proactively fixing potential problems.
Why?
Because good web hosting is essential for:
- Your business’s reputation
- Your website’s effectiveness
- Online sales
It takes a lot of effort! On your behalf this month, we:
- Sent 63 emails to our specialist server support team
- Sent 13 emails to our WHMCS support team
- Read 46 system emails
- Blacklisted 224 attackers.
- Checked 26 backups.
- Checked 7 suspicious files
- Enabled cagefs, which boxes in each hosting account so that a security breach on one account doesn’t affect the others.
- Updated WHMCS twice – the software which renews your domains, provisions your hosting, and manages your account.
- Updated WbTimelog, which enables you to see what tasks we’ve performed on your service agreement.
- Updated our managed WordPress hosting to WordPress 4.5
- Run daily, automatic updates of WordPress themes and plugins.
- Installed Hummingbird and WPSmush to speed up our managed WordPress hosting.
- Renewed and reinstalled Webhive’s SSL certificate – the thing that creates a padlock in the address bar, and encrypts your passwords and personal information to keep them safe.
We incurred these costs:
- Dedicated server leasing
- Specialist server support team
- Regular in-house staff time
- Ten software subscriptions (some of them security-related)
- Wildcard SSL certificate
- Offsite backup storage
It’s expensive to run hosting – if you do it right…
You get the picture – if you want to be taken seriously on the web – and have proper control of your website – don’t touch free or cheap web hosting!
If by any chance you’d like to buy Webhive’s good quality, reliable hosting, here are some links:
Buy Managed WordPress Hosting Buy Web Hosting
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