It is no secret, you can get hosting for as little as £1 a month or even less if you care to hunt around and get coupons etc. However, how much will that saving actually cost you and your business in the long run?
How much is the reputation of you and your business worth to you. Do you want your customer’s perception of you as someone who uses cheap hosting because your website is down most of the time? Won’t that lead them to think ‘if you cut corners with your website will you also do that in the product or service you provide’. Is that something you really want to cross the mind of your potential customers?
The reality is people have the luxury of shopping around online at their convenience, your website is your virtual shopfront, if it’s regularly down or slow they are unlikely to keep checking back. The bottom line is, you will lose business.
Whilst it is unrealistic to expect 100% uptime for websites, servers need maintenance too and will require a reboot at some point. But did you know that Google will penalise your ranking if your site is down regularly or slow? The lower your rank, the lower the amount of visitors you website will receive.
What if your site is hacked? When Google crawls sites, they actually run checks on them and if they suspect a site to be hacked then they will display a notice.
The main reason why sites get hacked is because they aren’t updated regularly, this leaves them wide open to vulnerabilities. Just like the apps on your phone need to be updated, there are themes and plugins on your website as well as the platform itself that will need regular updates. It will be an immense task for anyone to figure out EVERYTHING that has been done to your site and the only way to be sure is going through every line of code which can be VERY time consuming. If your site hasn’t had a backup the cleanest solution can be a new site created from scratch. This is often a quicker and safer solution, and of course expensive.
WordPress is one of the most popular platforms for web design and the one BlueSparkWebDesigns choose to use. You can see how often it is updated here: WordPress Updates. We haven’t completed three months of the year so far and already there have been 3 updates for WordPress in 2018. Updating is not a 2min process unfortunately, as there are so many variables you do need to properly test each component you update and then check the site is fully functional before you can properly roll out the changes. Do you have time to do all that AND run your business? Most cheap hosting won’t do this for you on a regular basis if at all!
In conclusion, yes there are cheap options available, there always will be. The small savings you may make initially will usually be outweighed by the hidden costs eventually. If you value the reputation of you and that of your business, which you have worked hard to build, then isn’t it worth investing to safeguard them while at the same time freeing up your time so you can focus on your business?
BlueSparkWebDesigns provides Managed hosting as a service, more information can be found here: BSWD Managed Hosting
This is what you get when you choose Managed Hosting with BlueSparkWebDesigns:
- Hosting on Premium servers.
- Regular backups of your Website and Database.
- Restore your website and database from backup.
- Routine site maintenance.
- Security updates to your site platform and framework.
- Critical updates to your site and plugins.
- Ongoing improvements to your sites aesthetics and functionality.
Also included, which helps to maintain the professional look and feel of your site are:
- Minor site alterations.
- Blog Posting.
- Manage Blog comments.
Most sites alteration requests are turned around typically within the hour, most within 30mins. Not only do we monitor your site 24/7/365 but we also make sure security updates are rolled out as quickly as possible and we also regularly update our servers to give our customers websites the best security and performance possible. On top of all that we also provide Premium VIP support as standard.
Over the coming months the team at BlueSparkWebDesigns will focus more on security and performance for all our customers, so we will be working hard in the background.
If you want premium grade hosting for your business then get in touch today!
BlueSparkWebDesigns Team
