4 Ways a Cheap Hosting Company Will Destroy Your Online Business

• Tweet

All the offsite link building and onsite SEO in the world can’t protect your website and online business from the dangers of a cheap hosting company. In fact, great offsite link building and onsite SEO can be ruined by the actions (or lack thereof) of a cheap hosting company. Don’t put your website at risk just to save a few dollars each month! Here are four ways a cheap hosting company could potentially destroy your website and online business:

1. Downed servers = lost content

Most cheap hosting companies are not going to backup your website. Frankly, you probably aren’t paying them enough to bother. Chances are it’s even spelled out (in very, very fine print) in your contract with them that they will not backup the content of your website. If something happens to their servers and your website loses pages of content there is nothing you can do about it. You might lose all of your onsite SEO and have to start at square one.

I actually had this happen to a client of mine, and they were considering pursuing legal actions against the hosting company. As much as it pained me to say it, I told them they would probably lose the suit (since the contract never said the hosting company would backup their site) and they would have to pay huge legal fees in the process. It wasn’t worth the misery, and rebuilding the lost pages was actually the less complicated option.

A good hosting company will always backup your website and be able to reset your website to the last backup should something go awry. This means you might only lose minutes of work as opposed to days or weeks of onsite changes.

2. Your website is open to attacks

Cheap hosting companies often lack the security of more expensive, US-based companies, leaving your site open to attacks and hackers. Do you really want to risk getting locked out of your own website? A good hosting company is going to protect your website and data with a strong network firewall that not only keeps hackers out, but alerts the hosting company when anyone tries to break into your site.

3. Little to no customer support

That same client that lost pages of content when their hosting company’s servers went down spent days trying to get in contact with the hosting company. The sent dozens of emails to every email address they could find and tried calling the customer service number at all hours of the day (the hosting company was based in India) but to no avail. It took four days for someone at the hosting company to get back to my client, and basically all they were told was to sit tight. You can imagine how well that went over. Since their entire business was web-based, if their site was down so was their business.

A good hosting company is never going to put their customers through the ringer like that. When a site owner is having issues, a reputable hosting company is going to get back to them in a reasonable amount of time and do everything they can to fix the issue on their end.

4. Downed servers = no revenue

I can understand a website owner that is trying to save money, especially in these tough economic times, but your website is your source of revenue—isn’t it worth the $200 a good US-based hosting company will charge you? Say your website brings in $10,000 a month in revenue; are you willing to risk that $10,000 just so you can save $150 by using a cheaper hosting company? How much is your online business worth to you? There are just some corners that you should never cut with your website and your hosting company is at the top of the list.

I know it might be tempting to pay some random overseas hosting company $20 a month to host your website, but don’t be penny wise pound foolish with your website! The potential for ruin is too great a risk just to save a couple hundred dollars.

About the Author – Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis is the Founder of Brick Marketing a full service SEO company based in Boston, MA. With nearly 13 years of Internet marketing experience, Nick Stamoulis share his SEO knowledge by contributing regularly to the Brick Marketing Blog and by publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers.

Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com