- Can you afford your business to have this image on it’s homepage?
I often get questions about why someone shouldn’t use a budget web host. These are web hosts that you commonly see hosting for $10 a month with amazing promises of 100GB of storage and unlimited transfer. They have ads all over the place, in magazines, on Superbowl Commercials, and online advertising on almost every google search. Their names are familiar and usually say something quirky such as “supergreathostdaddy.com”.
The other day I had a friend call and say that their website that was hosted at GoDaddy went down. I gathered their information and called GoDaddy to see if I couldn’t help alleviate the situation.
When I asked their technical support why this site was offline they mentioned that his account was $20 past balance and that they had removed the hosting option from his account. Amazed that they would remove their site for such a small balance, I asked that if the $20 was resolved if they would reinstate his hosting, they agreed. Then I asked if I would be able to retrieve the files only to find out that GoDaddy had removed them. They were more than happy to restore the backup copy that they “Most probably” had, for a fee of $159.
Most reputable webhosts will maintain multiple backups of your site and can restore your data with a quick call to their support team, and at no cost. Backups are an integral part of any hosting package, normally they only take a few minutes to restore, and it’s just simply good service.
Another feature that they love to offer is their amazing amounts of transfer that they allow. However, if you do actually experience any real traffic, they’ll pull your site offline as it’s too taxing on their servers as well as the bandwidth is costing them much more than you are paying annually. This happens quite often actually and in my opinion is a bad business decision. You want your site to have traffic. You build it with this in mind. You want people to use your site and see it’s content. Finally you get some good press, people are visiting your site, your name recognition is gaining, and then they rip your site down for actually asking for what they promised.
Another point that is worth considering is the theory that shared hosting is much akin to living in an apartment building. When looking for an apartment to reside your home or business in, would you consider a run down, overcrowded building with shady neighbors who don’t lock their windows at night?
Many of these webhosts do not take the time to get to know their clientele, and therefore are unaware of what is being hosted on their (sometimes outdated) servers. These servers are overcrowded to maximize profits per server, often with 1000′s of sites on each server, many shoddily coded and open for malicious attack.
Is your neighbor hosting porn? Are they running a file server pushing out illegal music / movies / software? Are they using the same mailserver that you use to send clients critical email to send out spam?
It’s anybody’s guess.
One last point that comes to mind is customer service. Many of these companies simply cannot afford to have actual people answer the phone, much less one who knows you and knows your business and it’s needs. Often times you’ll have your call transferred to a foreign company that has been outsourced to take care of support, if you’re so lucky to even find a phone number on their website to call when you need help.
It all goes back to the idea of “you get what you pay for”. If you spend more on your coffee each day than you do on making sure your business’ online presence is secure and always available, you may want to reconsider your business plan.
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