Everyone is always looking for ways to trim their Internet marketing budget, and in these tough economic times I can understand. Budgets are tighter than ever and every penny has to be accounted for. But I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among some of my SEO consulting clients in regards to what corners they are willing to cut in order to save a few hundred dollars—they are opting to go with a cheap hosting company. I think this is one of the worst ways a site owner can try to save money!

Why is a cheap hosting company a danger to your website’s success?

No Customer Service

I had a client whose site went dark for nearly four days through no fault of their own. Considering their entire business model was built on online purchases, you can imagine the panicked call I got one morning. This client, against my advice, had decided to move their hosting over to a company in India because it was only going to cost them $50 a month, compared to the $200 they had been paying for a US-based company. It took days of unanswered emails, phone calls, customer service help request tickets and community forums before we were able to get a representative from the company to fix the issue.

Lost Business

Imagine how much money that site owner lost in those 4 days?! A lot more than the $150 he saved by switching to a cheap hosting company. As a business owner, I know that my website is one of the single most valuable marketing and branding tools I have. Even though my company’s sales cycle is much longer than an e-commerce site, I don’t even want to think about what going offline for four days would do! Can your business really afford to cease to exist when your cheap hosting company makes a mistake and your website goes dark? Isn’t the security in knowing your site is safe from viruses and hackers and won’t go offline worth the extra money?

SEO

Usability is so important for SEO and a cheap hosting company can completely ruin the user-experience of your site. What visitor wants to work their way through a myriad of dead links and 404 errors because you hosting company messaged up? A site that is routinely plagued with errors, dead links and a lot of bounced traffic isn’t going to do much to earn the trust of the search engines either. Cheap hosting companies often lack the security of more expensive, US based companies, leaving your site open to attacks and hackers. Do you want someone else gaining control of your website?