Risking it all – Cheap and Nasty Website Hosting, Anyone?

When a potential new client comes along one of the topics that always comes up is the cost of website hosting. We hear about amazing deals that are out there, along the lines of the food deals that were offered a few years ago, you know the ones “all you can eat for $10” etc until you try them and find they really aren’t what they seem. Once we dig a bit deeper into cheap website hosting it turns out that the cheap deals provide exactly what you pay for. Very little. If you pay $2.99 for a month’s hosting, you’re likely to get no more than $2.99 worth of value. On a good day. In order to keep costs down something has been compromised and its most likely the security, unfortunately.

It's all a numbers game to these providers. So what if they lose clients? There will always be others ready to jump into the same deal. Caveat emptor takes on a whole new meaning when the buyer just wants cheap and can’t be bothered to think through the consequences of what will happen when something goes wrong. Speed and performance, along with security, doesn’t get a look in if the price is low enough.

Cheap is too risky at every level

Why on earth would you risk one of your organisation’s greatest assets for the sake of saving a few dollars each month? Do you put the cheapest oil in your car, or buy the cheapest brakes and tyres, or paint your house with the lowest priced (and lowest quality) paint? Of course you don’t (or shouldn’t) so why would you entrust your elaborate and high-value store-front (your website) with a cheap company that has a terrible reputation in the industry and an even worse attitude when something goes wrong?

Let’s face it, cheap hosts don’t care about you or your organisation. Some of them don’t even have a phone number you can call when things go wrong (and they inevitably will). They make it really easy to sign up for what they are selling (on-line of course, to keep costs down), but try getting any help from them. And if they offer you a free website to go with your cheap hosting check the terms and conditions before getting sucked in. Chances are it will be a very basic template that vanishes after 30 days, and of course will never be picked up by search engines.

Getting more than you bargained for (or wanted)

And then there are the real-life horror stories that abound about cheap hosts. Did you hear the one about the porn hack where a site gets infected with the redirect-to-porn hack and even once it’s been found and fixed it keeps coming back, for months and months. Apparently it gets in through the root of the server and has admin access. One weak link on the server (which hosts thousands of sites all crammed in) opened a gateway for everyone else to get hacked.

From day one Expert has taken great pains to ensure our clients’ valuable assets are hosted in a safe and secure environment. Each site Expert hosts is monitored in near real-time 24/7 and alerts a technician via SMS (short message service) in the event of an issue such as a website outage, DNS (domain name service) issues, SSL (secure) certificate issues, domain name registration expiration etc.

All errors are logged along with in-depth detail, allowing Expert to know what happened, by whom, using what and when, and the ability to reproduce the issues for diagnostics. Expert can even run the website through an IDE (integrated development environment) and step-through code to determine exactly what the cause is, allowing any issues to be fixed in a very short timeframe.

High quality hosting equates to high quality sleep.

With our own servers located in both Wellington and Auckland, New Zealand, Expert offers disaster recovery, should the need arise. We invested heavily in our hosting environment when Expert was first established, in both time and components, and have continued to upgrade and maintain a high-quality hosting service so that our clients can sleep at night without worrying about the security of their on-line presence.

As the old adage goes, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The cheaper the host, the more self-service is required by you. And let’s face it – most of us aren’t experts in this area so why would we want to take responsibility for it ourselves? A bit like performing open-heart surgery on your own heart!

So, if you’re looking for a bargain, low-priced hosting service, please think twice before you sign up for what might be the worst mistake of your career. For more information contact us@expert.services

 

Please complete the form below to find out more about MoST – we look forward to hearing from you!