The real cost of cheap hosting | Whitespace blog

Too good to be true?

Phil Barnes
07 Nov 08, 16:19 PM

There are no shortage of cheap website hosting offers. 24/7 support. Unlimited bandwidth, storage or email accounts. Free domain names. Why pay £400 or more a year for your digital agency to take care of hosting when you can pay £99 from an anonymous provider? Is it too good to be true? Nearly always in my opinion.

If you do nothing else, read the Terms of Service (TOS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). Here you will find the limits. Typically there are limits on RAM usage or CPU usage. This is sensible for shared hosting. If you are on a shared host and another sites gets lots of traffic, your site may suffer.

24/7 Support

We've had bad experiences from professional ISP partners offering 24/7 support and delivering nothing of the kind. Being on hold for an hour communication problems with non-native English speakers, being given incorrect or inconsistent information by junior staff members have been the norm.

99.9% Uptime

Everyone experiences downtime. What's key is how it is dealt with. Research the provider's name with the words 'downtime' or 'problems'. You'll soon come across any overhyped claims. The refunds offered for downtime are also meaningless in my opinion. They're usually a lot lower than the value of what you would lose from your e-commerce site being down, for example.

Key things to remember.

Good hosting is not cheap.

Good hosting means good support where you can speak to the same, senior person, whenever you need to.

Support is there to keep your services online, keep your servers fast and reliable, communicate effectively during emergencies and take the hassle away from your desk.

Phil Barnes, Interactive Director, Whitespace