Downsides of cheap hosting for your company site

Cost-effectiveness is one of the main goals of running any business successfully. Therefore, companies are always looking for ways to maintain quality while reducing operational costs. It is a never-ending pursuit that can often lead to questionable decisions. And among those decisions is the choice of opting for cheap or free hosting for your business website. While there are some benefits to this, they fade in comparison to the disadvantages, as many professional web development agencies will attest to. In this article, we discuss the downsides of cheap hosting for your company site.

8 downsides of cheap hosting for your company site

1. Bad page performance

If we were to look at SEO statistics and generally accepted criteria for page loading speed, search engines recommend that pages should load in under 3 seconds. In truth, this is just a passing grade for a website. If you really want your website to perform, you need a page loading time of under 1.5 seconds. The attention span of consumers is getting lower and lower, so businesses need to go the extra mile to keep them on their websites. If someone has to wait for more than a couple of seconds for your page to load, you can be sure that they will end up leaving.

And one of the downsides of cheap hosting for your company site is that it will slow your website down. Since most cheap or free hosting services are shared platforms, there is a lot of bandwidth that gets spent at the same time. Since you’re sharing the platform with who-knows how many other websites, your ideal page loading speed goes down the drain. And even if the bandwidth is unlimited, having other websites pulling more will leave your page performance wanting.

2. Unreliable customer support

Cheap hosting companies translate to cheap or non-existent customer service. They simply don’t have the resources or the obligation to offer professional support. And more often than not, cheap hosting doesn’t regard limitations when it comes to the number of users on their servers. Instead, they look to clutter the few servers they have with as many users as possible, which is inevitable to lead to all kinds of issues. Troubleshooting those issues becomes practically impossible due to the lack of personnel and professionalism. When you do try to have someone handle the issue, it either gets ignored or delayed beyond measure.

3. It brings down your SEO efforts

As we’ve already hinted, the overall functionality and performance of your company website play a key role for both consumers and search engines. The time it takes to reach that first-byte matrix of your site is a factor that Google does take into account when assigning value to websites. And this is a factor that is primarily influenced by network latency – the time it takes for the backend to create page content and the response of the server.

One of the downsides of cheap hosting for your company site is the fact that website responsiveness is much slower, which can lead to the devaluation of the website in terms of SEO. That is why professional SEO companies always recommend investing in quality hosting providers. A lot of marketing agencies have their own hosting reserved for their clients, to avoid such complications.

4. Data security is practically non-existent

The data you gather through your website is not only important but it is also confidential. It falls under the obligation of your company to guarantee the safety of that data to your customers, something that GDPR is making globally obvious. Losing that data to a cyber attack is a direct hit to the reputation of your business. And one of the major disadvantages of cheap hosting is that it makes websites very vulnerable to breaches. Cheap hosting providers simply lack the resources to guarantee the privacy and the security of your website, leaving all your data up for grabs.

5. Low-quality user interface

An important part of maintaining the success of your website and business is the ability to navigate through your website and get the data you need to conduct analytics. However, in order to do this, you need a user-friendly interface, which is not something that you can count on with cheap hosting servers. Even those hosting providers that have the capacity and will to provide support in this matter are likely to charge you extra money for the hours they put into it. And some might leave gaps in their solutions that could result in your website being hacked. So, if you are looking to avoid a flawed user interface, you need to turn to more reliable hosting providers or at least consider consulting with a web development company.

6. Lack of scalability

Scalability is one of the features that cheap hosting providers tend to use nowadays to attract more clients. They use the promise of cloud hosting to pitch scalable features in the future, only to never deliver on those promises. This is just a matter of reading the fine print and requesting proof before opting for the first hosting provider you come across. Instead, if you want to achieve genuine scalability and the ability to manage your website traffic as it grows, you will want to invest in higher-quality hosting.

7. Undesirable ads

Yet another one of the downsides of cheap hosting for your company site is that there are often strings attached. The hosting provider needs to make up for that low price of service, and one of the ways they do that is through ad placement. The way it works is that the hosting provider will use your website and others to sell advertisement space to other companies. And that means that upon landing on your site, visitors might get annoying popup ads and other types of commercials that will draw them away from your business or influence their overall impressions about your brand.

8. No domain name

Finally, we arrive at the last major downside on our list – the lack of having a separate domain name for your website. Cheap hosting plans can sometimes not include the option of getting a separate domain name for your company site. Instead, you are forced into using a sub-domain or the domain of the hosting provider. And you end up with a domain such as www.companywebsite.cheaphostingprovider.com. So, rather than risk losing your brand identity, why not simply opt for a premium hosting provider?

Investing more at the start will end up costing you less in the long run

Given all the downsides of cheap hosting for your company site that we explored above, the risks should be more than clear. And as a business owner, you can agree that there is more sense in opting for a safer and more reliable hosting solution, even if it will cost you extra. You can’t really put a price on the comfort of knowing that your website is secure and fully operational at all times.

• If you still have further questions on this subject matter, feel free to schedule a consultation with our web development team today! Helping your brand reach new heights is our goal, and we aim to see it through.