As the saying goes, “Location is Everything”…
When you select a location for your brick and mortar store, you’re always cognizant of the location. Selecting a home for your new web site is also important. There are plenty of cheap hosts out there that offer dirt cheap pricing that certainly fits the budget…but beware…that pricing usually comes with some strings.
Fact: Everybody wants to make money. You should not begrudge anyone for wanting their business to make money, you just have to know “how” they plan to make it. Most cheap hosting companies get you in the door with a cheap monthly hosting fee (which is fine), but don’t think for one minute that this is how they make their money. In fact, they’re going to try and make quite a bit of money off of you once you’re in the door.
Here’s how:
Add-ons
That low monthly fee usually means that you don’t get important elements included in your site…once you become aware, the price goes up.
Support
Many low cost providers will charge you if you have questions or problems. They’ll encourage you to use their FAQ-type pages for free…but generally, this becomes a tiring quest and generally, the answer you seek is not easily found.
Sign Here
Nothing traps a small business more than a bad contract. For weak hosts, this is a great way to get you under lock and key and prevent you from leaving…no matter what kind of service this host delivers. Sort of like asking you to pay to get your car repaired 4 times in one year before the garage has even looked at the car. Contracts aren’t always bad, in that they could save you some cash at some point…but not for your first time web site.
Annoying Support
“Yes, we’ll give you free support, but every time you call for help, you’ll get to sit through a 5 minute sales pitch for our latest stuff!” Oh…you wanted the “fast” server?
Like everything, you generally get what you pay for…in the case of cheap hosts, the most likely scenario is that you’ll be placed on a server with way too many web sites and at certain times of the day, your site will be virtually impossible to navigate because the servers are overloaded. Not only will this frustrate you and your customers, but any search engines, which happen to be crawling your site during one of these “peak” times will give you a poor rating because your page draw time is just too darned slow.
Mine, Mine Mine!
“Did you know that some hosting companies…especially those with eCommerce hosting will not allow you to take your site with you should you ever leave them and move on? Imagine all of the work you’ve put in being thrown out when you decide to leave…”
Shameless Kryptronic Managed Hosting Promotion
When we created Kryptronic Managed Hosting we used the above list and decided we didn’t want any of those problems associated with our program. You get tons of free benefits, no contracts and if you ever decide to leave us (impossible to imagine), you can take your site with you.
