You truly get what you pay for

How important is your website to your business? If it were to disappear today, what would happen? For most businesses, it’d mean losing leads, customers, sales and perhaps the use of your emails. For some it would be catastrophic – if your business is run through your website, it’d mean shutting up shop entirely.

It’s that consideration you need to keep in mind when you’re trawling through the internet looking for a website host. Maybe you want to move your current site, or perhaps it’s the start of a brand-new venture. It can be hard to work out who to trust with your site – why are some host providers so cheap and others so much more expensive? While you don’t want to feel like you’re being ripped off, when it comes to site hosting, generally, you get what you pay for. Bells and whistles of features aside, the hosting fees you pay are directly proportional to the care you and your site will receive.

And that care can make all the difference to your site’s performance and security. Here’s why it’s nearly always worth paying more for site hosting.

Help when things go wrong

A higher level of service shows its value when things go horribly wrong. This could creep up on your website in many forms – your team makes a small update on the site that creates a glitch, for example, or something more sinister like your security is breached by an external party.

If you’re paying your web host about as much as a takeaway coffee each month, that’s how much time and attention you can expect. There’s a slim chance they’ll even know your website has gone offline and an even smaller chance they’ll have the incremental backups you need to get things back up and running fast.

Support, not just features

A cheap web host will often try to lure you in with promises of free email addresses and unlimited visits. Don’t be fooled – those features are almost meaningless. What you need is a provider who’ll do more than just host your website files. Those host-only providers will be very cheap – think of them as storage facilities without fences, security guards, alarms or even a lock on your storage unit. It means you’re in charge of taking care of everything, making backups, storing and deploying any backups and running updates to keep security top-notch.

Smooth running

With premium hosting, you’re also paying to never have to think about your site. In most cases, you won’t even be aware that something’s gone wrong. That’s because premium hosts don’t just hold your files, they’ll actively manage them. They’ll keep on top of updates, have alerts set up for issues, and will be running backups so your website stays live while they resolve the underlying problem.

Protecting your clients

The data on your site might not just be yours. Chances are you’re holding information about your clients, too. As the website owner, you have a responsibility to safeguard that data – even something as simple as a leaked username or email address can land you in hot water, let alone something more sensitive like credit card details or personal information. That won’t just be embarrassing and damage your reputation, it could lead to severe financial or even legal penalties.

Once again, a premium host will offer tenfold the amount of protection against data breaches compared to cheap providers. That brings the risk of a breach down to almost zero, and also means you can show you took every reasonable step to keep data safe.

Insurance for your business

Since we all live online so much these days, your website is as important an asset to your business as your premises, vehicles, stock or equipment. Putting in necessary protections means you’ll get a good return on your investment and avoid breaches and downtime that could have devastating consequences.

Investing in decent website hosting can be seen as a kind of insurance – you’ll see the true value when something goes wrong. With a premium provider, instead of losing everything, you may not even notice it.