Cheap Web Hosting: Good or Bad?

Cheap Web Hosting – Good or Bad

By Nancy Saltz, HitHiker.com

As a search engine optimization expert, I am well aware of the frequency of searches on major search engines for the keyword phrases “cheap web hosting” or “discount hosting services” and even “free web hosting”. I often wonder if these searchers have a complete grasp of the potential business impact of such a search.

Cheap web hosting has only one real argument in its favor: the obvious monetary one. Low cost hosting allows new companies to start a website without making a large investment. That's it!

The arguments against low cost hosting are more numerous:

1.	Signing up with a hosting company, which has decided to sell below cost, is a recipe for failure. When a company sells a service below cost, they have only two options for the future, if they are to survive. They can either cut costs, which means cutting services, or they can raise their prices. In either situation, the customer is the loser.

2.	If you look at cheap web hosting from the viewpoint of the hosting company, you will find that the decision to under-charge for services makes even less sense. By offering services at a cost of $5-10 per month, if costumers require more than 10 minutes of service in a month or 2 hours a year, the hosting company will probably lose money.

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Ignoring the cost of the equipment and bandwidth, 10 minutes of service each month translates into an estimated $6 of service at $60 per hour. Since customers who look for cheap hosting options are often newly established, many will require more time than that, at least at first. Why would any company want to work with a hosting company with such a poor plan?

You will be sharing cheap web hosting server space with many other companies who have also decided not to invest in quality hosting services. They have, like you, decided to select services based solely on price rather than value. This can put your company at risk because these same people are more likely to make other bad decisions. For example, they may decide to buy mailing lists used to send SPAM. If they do, every domain on the server can be blocked by Spam-blocking software. Your company becomes a victim, too.