You see an advertisement for $10 a month website hosting. This sounds like a fantastic offer. The service comes with all the bells and whistles that your business needs and the company continually reinforces on its website that catering to your needs is its priority. Can your business rely on this business’s quality of service?

Quite often cheap hosting plans can be costly to your business in both dollar and time value. The television programme ‘Fair Go’ has highlighted the issues that can arise from opting to use a low cost website hosting provider quite a few times over the years. In one programme the show discussed the problems that a Christchurch web hosting company caused when its servers broke down for at least nine days. This downtime caused many businesses to lose potential business, revenue and data.

Not only were websites down for a lengthy period of time, the owners of the website hosting business were unable to be contacted by its clients or the ‘Fair Go’ team. Clients and 'Fair Go' were trying to establish a reason as to why the hosted websites had gone down or what level of compensation the company would be providing to its clients for the mishap.

This is not an uncommon occurrence for web hosting businesses that charge such low fees for their services that they lose financial viability. Here are some of the issues that can arise for your website when you sign up with a low cost web hosting provider:

• They may not offer telephone support, and if they do it might be at a high cost and in an inefficient manner
• Their servers may be located in a third world country
• They may be hosting thousands of domains on the same server as yours causing your website to load slowly
• The servers hosting your website may be very old
• Often security is compromised as this is seen as a 'cost saver'

Organisations pay for the quality they receive. A business is better off spending a few extra dollars each month to have its website hosted by a high quality hosting provider that can provide efficient customer support at no or a small charge. Low cost service providers require large volumes of clients to cover their cost of infrastructure, wages etc. This causes the clients waiting time for customer support to be increasingly inefficient and at a higher cost.

Signing up with a high quality website hosting provider allows business owners to sleep easy at night knowing their data is safe and that the servers that their websites are being hosted on are stable and reliable. Have a chat to us today about hosting your website and protecting your data.

If you would like to read the article about the website hosting provider in Christchurch, click here for the 'Fair Go' article (scroll down the page), or click here for Techday's review of the company.