Avoid Cheap Hosting

I firmly believe that you get what you pay for. Don’t put your website at risk just to save a few rand each month! Here are four ways a cheap hosting company could potentially destroy your website and online business:

1. Downed servers = lost content

Most cheap hosting companies are not going to backup your website. Frankly, you probably aren’t paying them enough to bother. Chances are it’s even spelled out (in very, very fine print) in your contract with them that they will not backup the content of your website. If something happens to their servers and your website loses pages of content there is nothing you can do about it. You might lose all of your onsite SEO and have to start at square one.


A good hosting company will always backup your website and be able to reset your website to the last backup should something go awry. This means you might only lose minutes of work as opposed to days or weeks of onsite changes.

2. Your website is open to attacks

Cheap hosting companies often lack the security of more expensive, Hosting companies, leaving your site open to attacks and hackers. Do you really want to risk getting locked out of your own website? A good hosting company is going to protect your website and data with a strong network firewall that not only keeps hackers out, but alerts the hosting company when anyone tries to break into your site.

3. Little to no customer support

A good hosting company is never going to put their customers through the ringer. When a site owner is having issues, a reputable hosting company is going to get back to them in a reasonable amount of time and do everything they can to fix the issue on their end.

4. Server Down Time

I can understand a website owner that is trying to save money, especially in these tough economic times, but your website is your online marketing tool. There are just some corners that you should never cut with your website and your hosting company is at the top of the list.

I know it might be tempting to pay some random hosting company R20 a month to host your website, but don’t be penny wise pound foolish with your website! The potential for ruin is too great a risk just to save a couple hundred rand.