There are hundreds of website hosting providers on the market offering a wide range of features and varying payment costs. As a result, it can be difficult to choose the right hosting provider for your website.
If you’re not familiar with website hosting, it’s tempting to choose the cheapest option. Why not? If it gets your website live, it’s good enough. Right?
Well, that really isn’t the case.
Sure, your website is live and you’ve saved some money. But in the long run, you’re putting yourself at risk of cyber attacks, data breaches, and downtime. Not only that, bad hosting provides an unsatisfying user experience, leading to less traffic and conversions.
With that in mind, why is some website hosting more expensive than others?
What exactly are you paying for?
What is website hosting?
Simply put, hosting is a place for all your website data – code, text, and media – to be securely stored and backed up.
Think of it like this: if your house is the website, your hosting is the foundation.
Speed & Performance
According to Hobo SEO Company, 40% of consumers will wait no more than 3 seconds for a web page to load.
In fact, according to Dynatrace, half a second difference in page load times can make a 10% difference in sales.
There are mountains of statistics about the relationship between loading times and conversions. They all point to the same conclusion: slow websites make fewer conversions than fast websites.
So, how does website hosting affect loading times?
Standard website hosting puts your site on crowded servers with fewer resources to power them. This means the traffic of other sites can negatively affect the speed and performance of your site.
Whereas on more expensive hosting, your website is placed on uncrowded, private, or dedicated servers with higher specifications. This means your website runs faster and encounters fewer problems and less downtime.
Security
Cybercrime is a growing threat for websites and online businesses.
According to the Cybercrime Intelligence Bureau, individuals and organisations in the UK reported losses of £1.3bn to fraud and cyber crime between 1st January and 31st July 2021.
Operating a successful website or online business demands proper cyber security. In the same way a bank protects its assets, a website needs secure website hosting to defend against cyberattacks, malware, and malicious bots.
An insecure website is open to downtime and data breaches of sensitive company and customer information. This can lead to a poor user experience and a damaged reputation.
A standard website hosting plan won’t provide your site with the protection it needs to be safe. In fact, your site is dependent on the security of other sites on the same server as yours. If one site on a shared server is breached, the entire server can go down, including your website.
Backups
Mistakes happen.
Core files can be deleted and weeks of content can be undone, all within a few clicks.
That’s why running a website or online business without a proper backup is very risky. A secure and regular backup is an essential business practice to ensure your time, money, and effort aren’t wasted.
A good website hosting provider will backup your website every day. In the event you need to restore your website, it can be done instantly to minimise downtime and losses.
Scalability
An optimal website hosting plan can meet the changing demands of your website or online business.
Let’s say your website attracts a wave of new visitors. Your hosting plan needs to be able to handle the new traffic while maintaining a satisfying user experience.
Conversely, if your online traffic is falling, your hosting plan needs to be able to scale back to save time, money, and resources.
Support
When you have a website or online business, you’re going to encounter problems. And when you do, it’s important that you have the proper support to deal with them.
A good website hosting service provides 24/7 support so you can focus on other things, like running your business. They can do this via phone, live chat, and a ticket system. Good hosting plans also assign an account manager to your website to ensure it receives the attention and protection it needs to stay safe.
Conclusion
All of these elements are crucial to good hosting. Whichever provider you pick should be able to offer you all of these without compromise.
Thankfully, we factor in all these points with our hosting. Every website has:
- Hosting on a server with no more than 20 websites on it.
- 24/7 monitoring to ensure websites are always online.
- AI to predict and pre-warn us of potential problems.
- Gold-standard support through our supplier partnerships.
- The ability to instantly scale and cope with demand.
- Daily backups that can be restored in a single click.
If you need any further information on hosting or what we do, please get in touch here.
