A cheap hosting service has promised you an amazing price. You’ve got your finger cocked to hit the “Buy” button, while a countdown clock shows you this deal is about to expire.
Before you hit that button, you need to know that this deal probably is too good to be true. Trust us when we say your business cannot afford cheap hosting. If you want to avoid this, we recommend that you check out these packages to find something more reliable and stable.
While the damage from bad hosting isn’t always easy to quantify, here are some very tangible ways it can eat away at your company’s bottom line.
Site Downtime
If you pay more for a cup of espresso than you do for a year’s worth of web hosting, you can definitely expect some downtime.
What is the real cost of downtime? If you’re a small business in a competitive local market, any downtime is basically gift-wrapping sales leads to your competition. When a would-be customer can’t get what they want from you, they will very quickly go somewhere else. And your competition now gets to play the role of hero after you disappointed them.
Let’s also keep in mind that your site won’t be the only thing that’s down, as your entire company may lose access to their email accounts, which can absolutely destroy your productivity.
Slow Speeds
Your site doesn’t even need to be down to alienate would-be buyers. It simply has to be slow enough to make people think it’s down.
Consider that pages that take 2 seconds to load have a 9% bounce rate. But if you literally take 2 seconds longer to load, the bounce rate quadruples to 38% for a 5-second page. And over half of surveyed mobile users will leave after 3 seconds.
The amount of time it takes you to read this sentence could cost you about a third (or more) of your leads.
Sabotaging Your Marketing
Let’s say you’ve invested heavily in Google AdWords. You’ve done a great job locking in on keywords and creating compelling ads. You’ve earned a searcher’s interest and their click… but once again, your landing page takes too long to load.
Now you have:
- Wasted your marketing budget
- Lost that lead
- Probably lost a sale
- Giftwrapped another lead to your competition
Don’t waste your creative and your budget by sending your qualified leads to a page that won’t load, which ends up sending them to your competition.
We know that a good deal is incredibly tempting in those first few months of trying to run your business on a shoestring marketing budget. However, it’s important to know that cheap hosting is never a deal. It’s an expense waiting to happen, as it will cost you leads, customers and even hurt your marketing efforts.
Spending just a little bit more money on a quality host can literally save you thousands of dollars in other areas. So choose wisely!