The cost of cheap hosting

I came across an interesting article a few days ago called The Hidden Costs of Cheap Hosting on a website dedicated to web hosting, which has an interesting web hosting guide. It outlines 3 concerns that webmasters should bear in mind when weighing up the cost of different service providers. The post list performance, downtime and spammy neighbours and the main three problems which can be found on this host.

• Poor Performance is where your website runs fine most of the time, but then you get days when it takes forever to load a page, you get all sorts of errors or your page just never loads.
• Downtime can be a result of poor performance; where you try to access your site and you just don’t mange. There’s a worse manifestation of this though; where you try to access your control panel, and not manage to get any response; or when you try to contact your provider and get no joy there. It can be quite frustrating when you can’t get an answer to your questions.
• Spammy Neighbours are something that you don’t have direct control over. However, when search engines see spam, they tend to keep track of where it’s coming from and call here “Bad Neighboughhoods”. Getting associated with these can be a problem for your website.

These are really manifestations of poor management and policies which characterise cheap hosts. Having too many clients on the same server can lead to performance and availability issues and not managing them correctly or having lax policies can cause problems to everyone. Remember, website hosting isn’t just about finding the cheapest price; it’s about finding someone you can build a long term relationship with; someone you can rely to keep your business running.