We've all made this mistake

Including me!

I wanted to warn you about something: Don’t go for the cheapest hosting option for your website.

This has come up for me recently with my clients and I thought it would be a good reminder for you.

I know it’s tempting. We see those adverts with celebs promoting budget hosting providers like GoDaddy for ￡6 a month but it’s a false economy.

I mean I'm as big a fan of Harry Redknapp as a Liverpool fan can be (which is pretty big considering his son is a Liverpool ledge), but I wouldn't trust his hosting advice as far as I could thro him.

“Buying the cheapest website hosting is a great way to save money in your business”

WRONG!

Cheap hosting can be a dangerous game, for a few reasons.

Firstly, some ‘cheap’ hosting providers recoup their money by charging extra for the kind of things that ‘more expensive’ hosts include as standard.

For example I’ve worked with clients whose sites were hosted with budget hosts who were then charged ￡70 for a security certificate, something I know that better hosts include as part of their packages.

Secondly, the support teams of budget hosting providers aren't usually very good. Unless you’re getting in touch about a problem caused on their side of things they will tell you to hire a developer. Which is going to cost you ￡￡.

Thirdly, their packages miss some essential features.

One of my client's hosting package doesn't come with the option to take backups and won't give backup plugins the correct permissions to create them.

So I had to manually download copies of the files, just in case the worse happens.

FYI - if I had to restore the site using that method it would take me at least 3 hours to do which obviously costs ￡￡￡, vs the 10 minutes it should take otherwise.

Don’t be fooled by those cheap prices designed to reel you in to then potentially cost you more in the long run.

Look, I don’t want to sit here and say you have to fork out ￡15 a month on hosting if that’s out of your budget right now.

What I do want to say is that you should buy the best you can afford right now, and then switch to a better host when you can afford it.

(And switching isn’t the hassle you might think it would be, a good host will help you switch. In fact my pick, Lyrical Host, will do the switch for you. For FREE!).

Kim

PS I have a great review of Lyrical Host, my pick for hosting over on my blog. Check it out here.