Shopping for cheap hosting?

I just had another conversation with a developer about the slow speed of the site he was building at some fatherly related hosting company.  I love this hosting company because most of the clients we get used to host their sites there.  They hosted there because the costs were cheap – but they learned over time that what they were saving in monthly hosting fees was actually costing them many times more in thier business.

Rarely has the saying “Penny Wise, Pound Foolish” made more sense than when speaking about hosting for a real busienss.

I’ll try to be short and concise here because there are serveral reasons that this claim can be made.  

First, and most importantly, there is the cost to the user, your client or potential client.  When a user visits your site and has to wait for it to respond, they notice, and they become impatient.  If you are doing a lot of transactional business with existing clients, this is not as much of an issue because you have a relationship, however prospective clients may not have the same level of patience.

Second, there is the cost in search engine ranking due to Google including PageSpeed into their algorithym.  A slow site could mean a poor user experience in Google’s eyes which means you will rank behind others who perform better.  

Finally, and possibly the most costly, development and support costs.  We receive calls all the time from prospective clients and developers in the community about their sites being slow or breaking on other platforms.  There are many causes for this but among the mass hosters the primary cause is server overload and balancing.  When they put too many heavy sites on a single server, the server cannot possibly process all the requests.  So things slow down.

At IgnitionLabs we never overload our servers.  We are in the business of being profitable, but more importantly, we are in the business of providing a valuable service to our clients that doesn’t come at a true cost to their business.