No matter where you turn online, someone is going to be trying to sell you on the idea of cheap web hosting. Whether it’s low cost or no cost, there are companies that want to try and convince you that you don’t need to pay for a good plan. That’s simply not true, but even though this has been discussed over and over again, people still fall for the traps of cheap web hosting. If you are not sure what you should do, perhaps one more exploration on the topic will help you decide what is going to work best for your marketing needs. There is no shortage of cheap web hosting, and there’s a race to the bottom of the barrel in terms of price, so make sure that you are paying close attention to what very well could cause your brand to sink or succeed in today’s digital age.
Bad Brand or Clever Marketing?
In the late 1990s, and even through the start of the 2000s, a great deal of tech startups got into selling web hosting. They did it through shared hosting plans, and they were practically giving the space away. This was when you could get unlimited storage, and unlimited data for as low as $3.99 a month. Then things shifted, and the cheap web hosting became free. This on boarded hundreds of thousands of customers for each brand and the servers were overloaded. This may seem like a good marketing plan, but in the long term, the sites that were getting hosted were overcrowded, and started to go down fast. The problem cheap web hosting companies have is not so much the marketing that is grand, but rather the branding that comes as a result.
When you have a hosting plan, you expect your page to be up 99% of the time. Well, if the profit margins of cheap web hosting are very low, hiring tech support becomes difficult. If you can’t pay tech workers a decent wage, they will walk away from the opportunity. That’s where a mass exodus started to leave the tech world, and these companies were left high and dry.
Unlimited Data and Storage (Fingers Crossed)
When you look at the offerings that cheap web hosting will have, you are going to see that they will slash the data and storage caps and will give you unlimited space. This all seems grand, however, you will find that you are going to have to battle with these caps anyways. Shared hosting plans take one server and shove as many sites onto it. They partition a server into many segments, and you may not see any issue. However, all it takes is for one site on the shared server to get popular, and start pulling massive amounts of data from your area. If the server can’t take the hits, and it crashes, not only does that site go down, but every other site on the solution goes down too.
Even though tech workers can try to salvage data, restart the server, the damage of a downed website could already be done. As it stands, it’s hard to get cheap web hosting, with tech support that will actually monitor the servers, traffic, and deliver on the promise of 100% unlimited data and storage.
The Hidden Costs of Cheap Web Hosting
Purchasing cheap web hosting, or going with a free solution will cost you a great deal of money in the long term. You will find that introductory rates are nothing new, and on top of that, you will find that many companies are going to try to give you an upsell for more bandwidth, and more storage. If you don’t comply, they will hold your files hostage and leave you with nothing. Even if you have a backup of files, your brand and domain name could be held hostage by the company unless you pay more for a release.
In the long term, the lower costing price points may also be pushed by brands that are going to be gone within a year or two. When the tech bubble burst, millions of websites went down, and a lot of the major players selling cheap web hosting went under. Those sites, and companies are all a part of internet history, and that is not too far off today. All it takes is for one mass exodus to leave a web hosting company to see your site get undone, unplugged and gone from the internet as a whole. When it’s all said and done, it’s just not worth investing in cheap web hosting.
