LiveChat 
9 time bombs that can explode on you with those ‘cheap’ web hosting
Today’s digital landscape is ruthless.
Your website is where potential customers check out your business and form the first impression. Like it or not, people typically judge your business by its first impression. If you get it wrong, they are just a couple of clicks away from going to your competitors’ websites.
The digital infrastructure holding your website together is your web hosting service provider. It is tempting to cut corners and opt for budget-friendly web hosting services. But beneath the seemingly harmless surface of those low-cost service plans lie potential time bombs that could wreak havoc on your website, customer trust, and business successes.
So, here are the potential time bombs you should be aware of when choosing those ‘cheap’ web hosting service providers.
Technical Support Hell
Web hosting is a highly technical product.
As we all have experienced, technology is brittle. Things will go wrong, often at the most inconvenient time. Websites will break. Hackers are always trying to break in. You will need help. Contingencies are as certain as death and taxes. Therefore, you need to make sure that you can always get competent technical support when you need it.
Time-Zone
Someone in your web hosting service provider’s technical support team must always be available in your time zone. If your service provider comes from a foreign country (typically the USA), you must ensure they cater to your time zone.
One thing to note: even if they provide 24/7 technical support, many of their more advanced support operates in their home country’s time zone. Although you may be able to contact them anytime you want, if you are in the wrong time zone, you will only get the basic support. If you encounter more tricky technical issues, the basic support will have to escalate to the more advanced support, who will work on it during the business hours of their time zone. By the time they get back to you, it will be the next business day on your side. If they need your response, by the time they respond to your response, it will be yet another business day. Therefore, what should be fixable in one business day stretches out to multiple business days.
Phone Number
Next, you will want them to have a local phone number for you to call. Some of them provide 24/7 support, but you have to call a foreign phone number to get it. That means you will need to pay for international phone calls.
Staffing Levels
Nowadays, whenever you call any big business’s support line, they often put you on hold for a long time. Despite their claims of “Your call is important to us”, they are always “experiencing higher than average call volume”.
Likewise, you will not want your web hosting service provider’s technical support team to be chronically under-staffed, which means you can be put on hold for a long time when you need to talk to someone.
You can find out whether this is the case by looking at business review websites for any common complaints of poor customer service.
Local Staffs
Ideally, your service provider has local technical support staff from your country who can speak the same language, slang and even accent.
The reason why this is important is because web hosting is a highly technical product. Communicating technical issues with someone is challenging enough. Having to do that with someone who speaks in a foreign accent makes it even harder. Trying to understand the other party when pronouncing technical terms in an unfamiliar accent is a test of patience. The other party will also be experiencing the same too.
As this Reddit user complained,
Godaddy used to be the goto company for everything related to building and maintaining your own website, Just like with many other large companies their overseas customer service and support is ruining the company, Are these large companies that dumb not to notice that they are not saving money by having their service and support routed overseas to people who can barely speak or understand the english language.
I’ve had 3 issues over the last 2 months with Godaddy that required me to reach out to the company to get things rectified, each time I called them I had to deal with someone who can barely speak english, I had to repeat myself numerous times explaining what the issue was, and even then they still had no clue as to what was being said to them,
In this example, a lot of time and mental energy was wasted due to poor communication between the client and technical support staff.
Contrast this with this testimony from one of our clients at Stratigus:
I was using HostPapa for my website host and Microsoft Outlook for my email. Earlier this year, I had an issue with my business email which resulted in a 2 week outage. No matter how many times I contacted HostPapa, the problem did not get resolved. In desperation I asked a friend if they knew anyone and was given Stratigus’s number. Before I knew it, not only did they understand what I was saying but they had resolved the problem and I was back to normal.
No Advice–You Are On Your Own
Cheap web hosting service providers are DIY platforms. They follow a standard cookie-cutter approach for all their clients. They do not provide you with any boutique advice. If you want to have any custom setup to suit your business’s unique needs, there is no one to advise you on what is the best way to do it.
You are on your own.
At Stratigus, we are different. We provide boutique advice for our clients. For example, here are some of the curly issues our clients came to us before:
- Can I have a multi-blog website?
- Can I host multiple websites with a single web-hosting service?
- Help! My website broke! What can I do?
- Help! My website got hacked!
- Can I have a Protonmail email service for my domain?
- I heard that my domain needs a DMARC policy so that Google’s Gmail will not reject my emails. Can you help me set it up?
- What is the best way to secure my website?
- Why is my website running so slow?
- How do I make my domain ‘point’ to a Shopify website?
Our clients do not have to worry about all these curly technical questions. We provide the best technical advice to them and provide boutique technical services to solve their problems. They simply leave the technology to us. We manage technology for them. They focus on their business. No stress. No worries.
Slow Performance Due to Resource Limits
Cheap web hosting services are cheap for a reason. They put a limit on how much resources your website can consume on their web servers. This will become a problem as your business grows or circumstances change.
For example,
- As the number of website visitors increases, the demand for resources increases too. If the demand reaches the limit, your website will slow to a crawl or even ‘hang’.
- As you add functionalities to your website with plugins, you may find that some of them (especially the backup plugins) may not work because they are relatively resource-hungry.
- Depending on how your web designer and developer build your website, it may even be resource-hungry in the first place. The more resource-hungry your website is, the earlier it will run into performance issues.
By the time you discover that website performance is a problem, you will realise that you need to change your web hosting service provider.
Migrating an entire website from a cheap web hosting provider to a better-performing one is doable but painful. It may even be costly because you need to hire competent technical help to do it successfully. Worse still, you will end up increasing the complexity of your technical setup. Increased complexity will then lead to the next time bomb.
Unnecessary Technical Complications Due to Messy Setup
A functioning website requires an integration of these basic technical services working together seamlessly:
- Domain Registrar
- DNS Hosting
- Web Hosting
- Email Hosting
It may be tempting to mix and match different technical service providers to get the lowest prices. But the problem is, they will not be talking to one another to ensure that everything will work for you in the long term. Usually, what happens is that technical service configurations will pass through multiple technical hands. Each hand will only consider the best interest of the technical service they are responsible for. They will not consider the big picture to ensure that everything will work well together for you in the long term. As a result, the setup of your website infrastructure can get unnecessarily complicated and messy.
For example, the initial domain setup may be done by a friend or volunteer through a domain registrar. Then they pass on the technical details of the domain to a foreign web designer who hosts the website on an unknown web hosting service. Later on, someone else may attach a third-party email hosting service through the domain registrar’s online service.
Your domain registrar, web and email hosting services are spread across multiple technical service providers who have no interest in working and communicating with one another.
When technical problems inevitably arise (as your business grows and changes), it will be extremely difficult for you to explain the messy technical setup to any one of the service providers. If the technical setup was done by a friend, he might not document what he had done, which means you will need his help again. If you are no longer on speaking terms with him or if he is not available, you will not have the correct technical information to explain anything. For example, in one case, a small business’s technical setup got so convoluted that she did not even know who her web-hosting service provider was!
Since each of the technical service providers will only consider their service and not look at the big picture, they will not provide any advice on how to resolve complex interlocking technical problems across different service providers. Some of them may provide videos and tutorials on how to put together the various technical services, but you are essentially on your own to implement them.
This is where a lot of business owners get stuck and unable to move forward. Therefore, it is advisable to either:
- Consolidate all your technical service providers into a single provider so that they can see the ‘big picture’ and ensure that all your services will work together without any issues, OR
- Appoint a technical advisor who manages the ‘big picture’ for you to ensure that all the other technical services work together seamlessly.
At Stratigus, this is where we excel. We help our long-term clients ensure that all their technical services are set up to work seamlessly together with one another. For our clients, their technology just works, with no stress or worries. You can see their testimonials on our website.
Slow Performance Due to Foreign Servers
Most of these cheap web hosting service providers based their web servers in overseas countries (usually the USA). That means the web traffic for your local website visitors will have to travel from your country to overseas and back to your country again.
This will have an impact on the website performance for your local website visitors.
At Stratigus, our web servers are physically located in Australia. That means for our clients’ Australian website visitors, performance will be far better because there is far less distance for the web traffic to travel.
Missing Add-Ons
Sometimes, cheap web hosting plans do not include everything important. If you want them, you have to pay extra. All these extras add up. When they add up, what appears to be a cheap web hosting plan becomes very expensive.
For example, find out whether they include these things in your plan:
- Automatic Backups–It is almost certain that mishaps will eventually happen to your website. Hackers can get in and damage your websites. You may make a mistake and accidentally break your website. Automatic software updates (e.g. WordPress plugins, themes) may break something. If your website is regularly backed up, you do not have to worry. All you need to do is to roll back to a time before the mishap happens. Some sneaky web-hosting service providers do not include automatic backups in their plans. You have to pay extra to get it.
- TLS/SSL–Nowadays, every website is protected by TLS/SSL, which is the padlock icon that appears on the web browser’s address bar. Most web hosting providers include TLS/SSL for free. But if yours does not and requires you to pay extra to get it, you know you are being ripped off.
- Domain Privacy–The registrant information of a domain is a public record. If you are a registrant of a domain, this may be a privacy issue as you will be exposing your name, phone number, address and email address to the public. Domain Privacy is a feature where your domain registrar can ‘redact’ this personal information from the public record. Some of these cheap web hosting service providers charge you for this feature.
- DNS Hosting–The DNS records of your domain is critical. If it gets mismanaged or is not available, the flow-on impacts on your domain can be dire. For example, your domain’s email service can suffer an outage or your website can go down. Some of the cheap web hosting service providers require additional charges to host the servers that manage your domain’s DNS records. Often, you will not know you need them until a problem happens or your business circumstances change.
At Stratigus, our web-hosting services already include all these add-ons. You do not have to pay extra to get them.
Bill Shock With Price Baiting
The cheapest web hosting service providers often bait new customers with incredibly cheap upfront prices.
But these cheap prices are often only for the first year. After that, the prices may increase substantially. In some cases, the prices quadruple in the second year!
Worse still, some of these cheap web hosting service providers do not disclose the pricing for the second year. They will automatically debit your credit card for the subsequent years without telling you what the prices will be, hoping that you will pay (without looking) whatever they charge.
So, if you decide to choose one of these cheap service providers, make sure you read the fine print carefully. Otherwise, you may end up with a bill shock in the subsequent years.
At Stratigus, you will never get bill shock. Our prices are transparent on our website and we will always let you know the prices in advance.
Unexpected Foreign Currency Transaction Costs
Most of these cheap web-hosting service providers are based in the USA. Their prices are in US dollars. When you pay a service in US dollars, that means bank fees and unfavourable currency conversion rates.
What appears to be cheap (e.g. US$29.99) on their website may not be cheap when it leaves your wallet (e.g. AU$45).
Stratigus, on the other hand, is an Australian company. You pay in Australian dollars. There is no currency conversion rate or bank fees when paying us.
Financial Comparisons–Are You Really Saving?
In the next article, we will do the math for you and show you that you are not saving money with cheap web hosting services. Subscribe to our blog below and we will inform you when we publish that article.
|
|
