There’s an old saying; “cheap thing no good, good thing no cheap"
Why this matters to you:
1. If you’re making money from your website, either through direct sales or enquiries, then the consequences of a lengthy service disruption can be measured in lost sales.
2. If you’re not making money from your website (or think you aren’t) then downtime is more a nuisance than a cost to you.
Shared (cheap) hosting:
In some cases, the hosting that is provided free with your domain registration, or the cheap hosting that you can buy for less than $10 a month, can be reliable and relatively trouble-free.
However, when that hosting goes down for some reason, you’re frequently at the mercy of a ticket-based support system, with response times measured in days. Often, there is no telephone support available.
If the server was taken down by a hacked site or corrupted database among the 100,000 other sites on that shared server, it can take weeks to trace the fault and rectify it. In the meantime, be prepared for frustration and continued service outages as the problem is tracked and dealt with.
Tech support for cheap shared hosting is often out-sourced to countries several time-zones away, restricted to business hours (theirs, not yours), further lengthening response times.
The $$ component:
You're a realtor listing holiday rentals, and your site is down (or moving very slowly). Your potential renter will move on to the next realtor listing the same property. There goes your rental commission. And next year, the renter may not even try to do business with you, choosing instead to rent from your competitor again.
You’re a car rental company in a holiday destination. Same scenario as the realtor above. Lost sales and maybe lost repeat business.
There are many scenarios in which an invisible or unresponsive website can result in lost business.
Slow and unresponsive sites can also get penalised in Google rankings. Site downtime is also noted by Google and can affect your rankings and traffic. And therefore, again, your bottom line.
The tradeoff:
You may be able to find cheap hosting for $200 a year (or less), and a web development company offering dedicated hosting may charge $2,000 per year.
Huge difference, eh?
Unless you’re the realtor who’s just lost your $1,000 commission on that villa rental because your website has been down for 3 days.
That $1,800 premium can seem much less significant pretty quickly.
As with anything, there is a trade-off, but this one is simple.
Is the premium for dedicated hosting by a reputable company worth it, in terms of the potential lost sales by using a cheap host provider?
NOTE: I’m not condemning all cheap hosting as ineffective. However, with the benefit of 18 year’s experience in the web development / hosting industry, I can say that it’s a case of more often than not. Even those clients who have been adamant about staying with their original host have changed to dedicated hosting within 6 months or less. The holdouts are maybe 1 in 100.
Top 5 benefits of Dedicated web hosting:
Dedicated hosting will typically be more expensive than shared hosting, but it does not have to be prohibitively so.
Dedicated hosting can provide you with:
- 24/7 telephone (and email, and live chat) support.
- 1-hour hardware replacement.
- Web servers hosting 100 sites, instead of 10,000 or 100,000 sites. (Much less webserver load)
- Downtime for hardware / software updates scheduled around client’s business needs to minimize potential impact.
- Rapid cloud deployment for huge traffic increases.
Caribbean New Media dedicated hosting:
Caribbean New Media can provide all of the benefits of Dedicated web hosting, in addition to 18 year’s experience in hosting as well as web design, web development, SEO, legacy systems integration and more.
