Cheap web hosting is perhaps on of the most hyped services available on the internet today. Of all the types of hosting packages available, Virtual Private Server hosting and shared hosting are the lowest in terms of cost. Shared hosting is at the bottom of the ranks.
Cheap web hosting relies on the influx of new customers looking to make huge profits by having a low financial outlay at the start of the internet ventures. This is a very profitable avenue for web hosting companies to hire out web space to such customers.
If financial constraints are not a factor, then there are several reasons why one should not consider cheap web hosting.
These hosting packages have low reliability. Hosting companies will proudly claim to have ‘99% uptime’ and ’24/7 support’, but many people do not realize that these are marketing gimmicks and that their promises are very difficult to uphold. Forced to share a server with hundreds, if not thousands, of other web sites, the strain on server resources is bound to manifest at one time or the other and the server will go down, or crash, making you lose important data.
When traffic surges on the server that you are hosted on, the bandwidth available for your site is greatly reduced leading to longer page load times and this may frustrate your customers forcing them to leave before any transaction is completed.
Companies that offer the cheapest web hosting also offer Virtual Private Server, ecommerce and dedicated hosting at their data centers. These are very expensive and the paying customers will definitely get first priority when it comes to technical support. When the lines are busy and the support staff is hectic, they will probably put you on hold as they deal with their higher priority, paying customers.
Companies that ask you for number prompts when you call their support staff are looking into your web hosting plans and putting you on a kind of priority list, giving higher priority to those customers with more expensive hosting plans.
The cheapest web hosting plans also expose you to high security risks. There may be people on your web sites that are mischievous and may carry out cyber attack on those on the same server in an effort to destabilize their web sites and claim more server resources.
Hackers tend to attack online ventures that are of value to them. You may not have experienced an attack when your business was small and almost invisible, but once you start making reasonable profits, it is advisable to move on to paid hosting that will offer you better security against such attacks and save your business. Inference attacks are the worst, where they enter into your secure forms and steal crucial customer data from your database.
Generally, internet service providers will offer the cheapest web hosting to customers so as to add value to their standard, more expensive, paid services. One should act prudently and take any hosting decision accordingly as it affects their business directly.
Shane Stafford is a writer for the popular webmaster site Who Is Hosting This. Learn more about reviews and find some coupons.
