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How a Business Can Be Adversely Affected by Web Host
It’s expected of a business owner to reign in unnecessary spending, but sometimes this responsibility is warped and the word “unnecessary” is taken out of the equation, resulting in businesses trying to spend too little on things that they should have spent more money on. One such case is with website hosting.
It’s easy for businesses to make do with cheap hosting because they get blinded by the savings and don’t see anything wrong past the working and accessible company website. However, there are a number of ways that a business can be adversely affected by a poor web host, such as:
Slow Loading Speeds
If your website is loading slowly because the cheap host you went with can’t accommodate the massive bandwidth all of their customers require, your business will suffer on two fronts. First is that you could turn away customers as they grow impatient waiting for the website to load. Next is that you might not even get customers as Google’s ranking algorithms also take website loading speed into account during ranking.
Downtimes
It’s common knowledge that no web host can ever truly offer 100% uptime. If a web host is trying to promote itself as one, stay clear of it as they are clearly lying. Servers need to go down every once in a while even if with the absence of hardware failures because of maintenance and upgrades. But generally, you go with web hosts that ensure the least amount of downtimes, and that’s something that extremely cheap hosts can promise. If your website is frequently unavailable, it’s obvious that the effects on your business are costly: think of it as a shop being closed frequently. You lose out on every single sale that the shop is closed and you lose out on future sales from people who are never going to return after getting the impression that the availability of your store is unreliable.
Poor Security
Cheap hosting is usually possible only because the hosting provider also goes for cheap services on their end. This could mean lack of staff or lack of expertise among the staff, cheap backend software, and cheap hardware. Additionally, they save a lot of money by trying to get as many user accounts sharing the same hardware resources. This all adds up into a perfect storm of poor security. When (not if) a hacker gets access to a cheap host’s servers, not only can he shut down or deface your company website, he can also gain access to important company info and maybe even steal your customer’s data. Hackers these days are financially motivated, so businesses are prime targets. If you choose a web hosting provider with poor security, you are painting a really, really big target on your business.
Poor Customer Support
Cheap hosting companies can’t really provide the kind of on-demand, expert customer support that businesses need. Even if they do manage to hire a really good employee in charge of support, chances are they can’t afford hiring an entire team of the same caliber, at all. And everybody knows that a single support person, no matter how good she is, can’t handle the needs of multiple clients particularly in a tech-heavy industry like website hosting. If your host has poor customer support, you can expect problems to be made even worse by the difficulty in getting things sorted out.
Conclusion
We’re not saying that all cheap hosting options are to be shunned, and we’re not advising you to waste money on premium hosting companies that are overkill for your needs. The key takeaway here is that when it comes to web hosting, you have to pay attention to where you’re throwing your money away. Do not be blinded by the allure of a few bucks saved on monthly hosting fees when the problems they will bring could cost your business thousands of dollars in lost sales and poor image.
