{"id":12903,"date":"2010-11-09T09:26:32","date_gmt":"2010-11-09T09:26:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.hostduplex.com\/?p=176"},"modified":"2023-03-25T01:10:30","modified_gmt":"2023-03-25T01:10:30","slug":"the-high-risk-of-low-price-tags","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/the-high-risk-of-low-price-tags\/","title":{"rendered":"The High Risk of Low Price Tags"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When choosing a <strong>web hosting provider<\/strong>, it&#8217;s tempting to go with the cheapest possible option. After all, why pay anywhere from $10 to $40+ a month when you can pay five bucks or less?<\/p>\n<p>Well, several reasons.<\/p>\n<p>Since the early days of the internet, <strong>fly-by-night<\/strong> providers \u2014 and even a few of the larger, more established ones \u2014 have been offering ridiculously low prices, often packaged together with impossibly lofty promises (check out <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/truths-and-lies-about-web-hosting\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the earlier entry<\/a> on &#8220;unlimited&#8221; <strong>bandwidth<\/strong>). Before signing on with that kind of deal, here are a few things to consider:<\/p>\n<p><strong>What Rock-Bottom Prices Really Mean<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A provider&#8217;s <strong>hardware <\/strong>budget comes, in large part, from their hosting fees, or lack thereof. A provider who charges pocket change isn&#8217;t likely to have much more than pocket change for <strong>maintenance, upgrades<\/strong>, or <strong>overhead.<\/strong> It&#8217;s not uncommon for budget providers to host their clients&#8217; sites on ramshackle custom-built machines, machines that often fail, without enough <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/what-is-redundancy-and-why-is-it-important\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">redundancy<\/a> in place to keep their clients&#8217; sites up when they do go down. It goes without saying that even a few hours&#8217; down time can cost an <strong>e-commerce<\/strong> site hundreds, thousands, or more in lost business \u2014 much more than they &#8220;save&#8221; on hosting fees, and that&#8217;s if a few hours is all it takes for the site to come back.<\/li>\n<li>On a related note, a provider who skimps on hardware isn&#8217;t likely to spend much on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/outstanding-customer-service-an-absolute-necessity-in-webhosting\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">customer service<\/a> either. When it comes to e-commerce, <strong>tech support<\/strong> has to be decisive, effective, and immediate \u2014 and more than that, a paying client has the right to know that it <em>will<\/em> be. Sadly, there&#8217;s an entire genre of stories about poor customer service, much of it online. A\u00a0fly-by-night provider might take hours, even days or longer, to answer back, and may or may not be able to solve the problem. In the worst cases \u2014 they&#8217;ve been rare, but they do happen \u2014 entire websites have been lost.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Bargain-bin rates are certainly eye-catching, and they may appeal to your pocketbook, but be aware of those long-term costs, and always read the fine print.<\/p>\n<p>When you invest a little extra, you&#8217;re investing in better hardware, ongoing upgrades, higher security, capable customer service, and, above all, reliability. What it all adds up to is peace of mind, and that&#8217;s something more valuable than any discount.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you invest a little extra, you&#8217;re investing in better hardware, ongoing upgrades, higher security, capable customer service, and, above all, reliability. What it all adds up to is peace of mind, and that&#8217;s something more valuable than any discount.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":13926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,38],"tags":[57,58,59,35,60,61,62,39,63,64],"class_list":["post-12903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-web-hosting-industry","tag-buyer-beware","tag-costs","tag-customer-service","tag-hardware","tag-prices","tag-rates","tag-reliability","tag-security","tag-tech-support","tag-upgrades","article","has-excerpt","has-avatar","has-author","has-date","has-comment-count","has-category-meta","has-read-more","thumbnail-"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/risk-of-low-costs.webp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12903"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13928,"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12903\/revisions\/13928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hostduplex.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}