The surge of discount and budget website hosting providers both in Australia and the rest of the world has caused many businesses, especially small to medium businesses with relatively small hosting requirements to make the switch in an effort to cut costs in these tighter economic times. Is your business really saving money though? You might be surprised to learn that many budget website hosts could actually be costing you valuable sales!
We have a variety of clients on our online management framework to monitor their websites speed, security and uptime. We receive alerts immediately if any website we monitor goes offline. In the past 12 months we have only received one such alert for any websites hosted here at G-Force which was due to a server malfunction that was dealt with immediately and had service restored in around 30minutes (that’s more than 99.99% uptime!). Unfortunately the same can not be said for our client websites on budget hosting providers. In any given week we receive between 1 and 5 alerts of client websites on budget hosting servers going offline, sometimes only for 5 or so minutes (likely a server crash/reboot) and other times up to a few hours.
Another problem we’ve noticed increasingly is the speed of the websites hosted on these servers. In the past year Google announced that your websites speed would play a factor in how you are ranked on Google (ie. faster websites have a better chance of ranking #1) and since then we have been monitoring our clients page-speed score as part of the online management service. We’ve found that websites hosted on G-Force hosting servers score on average around 15 points higher than the budget website hosting providers (page-speed score is out of 100)
Disadvantages of Budget Website Hosting
For those who like a quick summary here are the key things to remember with budget website hosts
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- Considerably lower website uptime.
- A slower website load time which can cost you Google rankings and in turn – customers
- Risk of your data being exposed to malicious code both intentional and unintentional from other hosting customers squeezed onto the same server
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For more information or if you’d like to get a quote for moving your websites onto a premium hosting provider get in touch with us today!