Disadvantages of Cheap Hosting

Saturday, 11 December 2010

Cheap hosting may seem like the solution that most websites need to make them more affordable.  Of course anyone could take a cheap hosting option when launching a site then progress into a better hosting solution once the website became more popular.  Of course the problem really is when these plans are chosen over one that can accommodate adequate growth of traffic and bandwidth use for a great website.  There are a number of disadvantages that cheap hosting can unfortunately provide.

Is cheap hosting a good choice?

Uptime - Not all plans will offer 99.99% uptime.  Usually cheaper hosting packages may not offer a guarantee that your site will be up and running, especially during heavy usage periods when something is most likely to go wrong with the server (which is most likely shared with hundreds of other websites).  This means that the reliability of the service may be compromised.
Speed - Speed of the server and how your hosting is handled may not be a priority with a cheap hosting solution.  This means that the website may have noticeable slowdowns in download and upload times for your visitors.  This may lead to broken images and media that take too long to load.

Storage - Many cheap hosting services will have lower storage and bandwidth limits.  Although a few GB of storage may sound like enough, websites that are going to be uploading a large amount of content can easily break these low limit amounts of storage.  Many lower cost plans may also have high cost "restoration" fees to get the website back up and running a while longer before the next charge period begins.

Control Panel - The control panel is important to a large number of users and some cheap hosting services will only give a watered down one with fewer accessibility options.  The control panel without the higher level of control function that is necessary for professional website creation may not be able to adequately provide the tools which can help to manage the site.

Compatibility - Many of the lower cost hosting services will have compatibility issues with software which can be installed server-side.  Hosting may only be available on Windows or Linux based servers which can prove to create difficulties for website owners that plan on using certain coding languages for their websites and site software.

Although not all webhosts are horrible, many will not provide adequate resources or tools to create a website that is truly great and comparable to websites that have better hosting plans and services.  Customers of cheap hosting services should really look into finding an affordable option that is more reliable, faster, provides more space, better control of the server and is compatible with the software, scripts and other types of coding languages they will be using on the site.  This will help to save money and prevent overages with the plan, unlike the high costs of cheap hosting when service needs to be re-enabled after exceeding bandwidth or storage on the plan.