You’ve heard the saying quality over quantity, right? We are sure it has come about when talking about food at restaurants, television shows, and now even what type of web hosting to choose as a business. It’s essential to know when to make the right call for what business expenses need priority.

Is choosing premium hosting worth the higher cost? Or can you get everything you need without spending more than you need to?

In the debate; Premium Vs. Affordable hosting, we uncover the hidden truths behind choosing the right option for your website.

Shared Hosting

Affordable hosting is often a server with generic software where you can build whatever you want. Thousands of websites opt for this option because of the price. If you are willing to spare one coffee per month, it may be worthwhile. It is perfect for smaller businesses with limited traffic, files, and storage on their pages. They are stored and hosted on a single, shared server. These perks do not always have to mean they lack functionality. But, they’re built for any platform which can lead to performance and security issues.

The bad news first

Do you love to hear the bad news before the good, or is it just us?

The term shared hosting is an interchangeable word for cheap hosting as it does just that. By opting for a cheap hosting, you will be sharing the features with others. It may result in a slower load speed. You will also be limited to other features such as security and resources like a personalised domain name.

Your audience may question the authority of your website when it ends with wordpress.com. A clean and on-brand URL will help put the metaphoric cherry on top of your website.

Cheaper plans have storage caps and data limits that will restrict your capabilities on your website. Storage caps directly affect your page’s performance and can even extend to your search engine ranking efforts.

Nobody likes a slow website. Sharing the same hosting server with other sites will increase your load speed and decrease your click-through-rate.

Why one coffee a month is worth it

Yep, you read that right. Shared hosting only costs up to a couple of dollars each month, if any.

Shared or Standard websites are more affordable, less complicated, and quicker to finish up. You still get all the necessary features to keep your website up and running in a cheap and obtainable way, letting you focus on other areas of your business in more detail.

The main feature which stands out is the price. You will be saving up to ten times more by relying on shared hostings. The extra money in your pocket can make the difference for other significant business aspects that may not have cheaper options. You can always upgrade at a later stage.

You can look at it like you are renting an apartment – you share the space. It means you cannot use up a lot of space on your pages. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I mean, minimalism is trending after all. Because you are renting this space, that means the landlord will look after any maintenance or updates along the way.

Premium Hosting

If you flinch at the words: painfully slow, hacked or crash, you’ve probably experienced this from a cheap hosting service. You are not alone. After receiving increased traffic or running out of bandwidth, your site can often come to a halt. These are some of the reasons why premium hosting may be for you.

The Pricier side

Premium hosted websites often cost more and take more time to finalise. At Web3, we use WP Engine, which offers several different hosting solutions for WordPress, from around $49 / month. They allow for a generous amount of websites, domains, visitors, storage, and bandwidth.

WordPress and other hosting companies tend to charge more. They host on better infrastructure designed for WordPress. They also build for that platform and can offer better support, security, and admin work.

With a new website or business, you don’t need all those extra features. You can suffice with a more affordable hosting option. One that will get you up and running without making you break that piggy bank. Now, this is where cheap hosting comes into play.

Why a dollar a day is worth it

Your website is your most valuable asset. Security is an important feature that drove James and Joseph to invest in premium hosting to grow Web3. Premium hosting servers have reliable measures to ensure your website is safe and secure. They send data through a secure SSL network for monitoring that enhances their reliability.

These protocols also mean reduced load time, even while being inundated with traffic. Your website will have 100% allocated for optimal performance, which will aid your Search Engine rankings. You can feel rest assured that your site is in safe hands.

Choose the hosting will help to save you the headaches. — Choose the hosting server that will save you the headaches.

The Ugly Truth

It is necessary to know what exactly you want from your website. It will allow you to look beyond the price, which is often the feature that stands out the most. If you’re after a run of the mill site with no upkeep, the affordable option will suit you nicely. However, to save you future headaches, we recommend investing in a premium hosting service.

Do you want insanely fast hosting, rock-solid security, and secure daily backups?

There is nothing worse than having potential customers look for you but end up stumbling upon your competitor because your hosting wasn’t doing what it should.

We can set up and manage your WordPress website on the world’s best WordPress website hosting platform.

At Web3, we have decades of combined experience working with website hosting servers. We can give you a reliable hosting server for your business and a dedicated team who will be there to answer any of your calls.

Let us know what you need us to take care of so that you can get back to growing your business. We’ll take care of the tricky stuff, easy as that.

GET IN TOUCH

Listen In

Listen in to what we uncover in our intense debate: Premium Vs. Shared Hosting, and what is more beneficial for you. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Let us know who you agree with, in the comments below.

Podcast: Ep 11 – Premium Hosting Vs Affordable Hosting

Transcript

James: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 marketing debate show. I’m your host, James Banks.

Joseph: And I’m your host, Joseph Chesterton.

James: And today, we will be debating everything and everything about hosting. So premium hosting versus affordable hosting. Unfortunately, I’ll be taking the affordable hosting corner of this debate.

Joseph: Sounds like you are preparing to lose already, James.

James: We’ll see about that, Joseph.

Joseph: And I’m obviously on the premium hosting side.

James: Well, without further ado, let’s start the show. So Joseph, why is premium hosting better than affordable hosting?

Joseph: Well, James, websites are one of your business’s most valuable assets. If your website isn’t working for you like it’s crashed or it’s down, then you potentially could be losing millions or even billions of dollars. You need to invest in really good hosting.

With affordable hosting, you run the risk of having your website hacked, crash, or run out of bandwidth. So as a result, you would lose business and lose reputation for your company.

Good hosting is everything. Yes, of course, it may cost more, but that comes with support, it comes with better infrastructure and it’s easier to build your website on.

So that’s about all that we need to cover. Thanks for listening in and we’ll speak to you next time. No, I’m kidding. James, why is affordable hosting better than premium?

James: Probably should have clarified this before we started, but I guess we need to define what is premium hosting and what is affordable hosting. So in your words, Joseph, what would you define a premium web host? What are some examples? How much do they cost? What’s the difference?

Joseph: A premium host usually is dedicated to the platform you’re building for.

So for example, WordPress, you’ll find managed WordPress hosting companies, generally have a higher price tag because they are hosting on better infrastructure that’s built specifically for WordPress. On top of that, they build specifically for the platform and can then offer better support, security and administrative work. They do that on the server.

Whereas affordable hosting, is often just a server with generic software that enables you to build whatever you want. But this isn’t specifically built for WordPress or any type of platform. It means that you may run into performance issues, security issues, and the list goes on.

James: Okay. And how much would, say, a premium WordPress website hosting server costs per month, approximately? Where do they start at and what’s the range?

Joseph: Premium hosting depends on your usage requirements. We use a company called WP engine and they offer several different hosting solutions for WordPress, and they start at AUD$49 a month and scale from there.

They allow for many sites and a generous amount of visitors, storage and bandwidth. That is something you probably won’t see on shared hosting or affordable hosting, which is what we’re calling it today.

Affordable hosting can cost anywhere from a dollar a month to… I guess it could cost hundreds of dollars, but generally, you would see it priced around $5-20. That’s generally the affordable hosting range.

James: So what I’m hearing is that for a managed specialised service, such as a managed WordPress hosting environment, it’s going to run you the cost of maybe about $40 per month. But you’ll have the added benefit of better performance, more security, specialised hosting environments, so on and so forth. But I can get exactly that for $5 a month. So why would I pay four or five times the price for the same thing, Joseph?

Joseph: Arguably, if the server was the same as the affordable hosting as far as hardware goes, yes, you probably could get that. But the thing is, you won’t get 24/7 support. You won’t get prebuilt themes in WordPress.

You won’t get automated backups that… Well, you may get automated backups but you can’t guarantee that they will work if your server crashes. With premium and managed hostings, you don’t usually see them crash. Whereas with affordable, you run the risk of it crashing.

You get a team of people that manage the server so that if things like security issues become an issue, then they’ll fix it for you, and you can rest easy knowing that your business is well looked after online.

James: So basically what you’re saying is, although you have to pay more, what that added cost means is, added supporting service. But what if I want to take care of it myself and pocket the change? What would be the value in that case?

Joseph: I mean, you could do that when you’re trying to run a business, you run the risk of your website going down and then having no one to bring it back up, except for yourself.

It might be limited support, but you’ll have to wait 24 hours or even pay for support or get shipped to another company. We found this out the other day when we were helping a website recover from being crashed on their own affordable hosting.

When we contacted the provider, they said, “Yeah. We can help you, but it’s going to cost X amount, and it’s going to go through a third-party provider. We’re not going to do the help for you.”

We had to recover the hacked website that was down for the client on our own, which we could easily do. But if you’re on a managed hosting platform, then they will take care of that for you.

They’ll be able to restore the website in seconds, rather than a couple of hours that it took to recover.

On top of saving money, the reason why you pay the extra amount for premium hosting is that the platforms that they post on, the software that they provide is fine-tuned. It will run your software better than just the generic software you’ll get from the affordable hosting.

James: Well, that’s a pretty convincing argument, Joseph, but what about my emails? These whizzbang high-performance servers that you’re talking about don’t allow me to put my emails on it. And I’ve got emails coming out of the wazoo.

If I were to not have a server without emails, it’s going to cost me so much more. Why would I even consider having to go to the server that doesn’t allow me to put my email accounts on it?

Joseph: It’s funny you say that because that was another issue that a client came to us about. They had three websites hosted on their affordable hosting, and they had email accounts on top of that and a dozen accounts that were filling up.

Each account had a couple of gigabytes of emails hosted on it, and when your hosting server only has, in this instance, 20 gigabytes of storage, when your email accounts are on the same platform and each account has a couple of gigabytes, there was no room left for the hosting, which crashed the website and meant that the website wasn’t able to be used.

And then on top of that, all the emails were bouncing because there wasn’t enough space available for the emails to come through.

The better option is you should use a platform like Microsoft or Google or any other email provider. Let them take care of the emails for you.

There might be a cost per account, but if your server goes down, then you will lose not only your website, but you will also lose your emails on top of that.

That’s a pretty huge loss to your business if both your emails and your websites go down, especially if you rely on them to make money day to day.

James: Well, you’re probably thinking by now, “Well, geez, there wasn’t much of a debate with this show,” and why? It’s because it’s the truth.

Over the past 10 years myself and Joseph have been in the web game, we’ve dealt with over a hundred different website hosting companies. All of the major ones you can think of have the same rule: you get what you pay for.

You pay for peanuts and you expect diamonds, that’s just not how it works.

Particularly in the case of web hosting, you get what you pay for. Hosting for your website is in proportion to all other business, marketing and advertising expenses. It’s one of the least things you’ll ever have to worry about. It shouldn’t even be a cost consideration.

Of course, if your actual website is working for your business, keep things safe and secure.

Rest easy at night and invest in high quality, premium hosting infrastructure. You won’t regret it.

Take it from us, out of dealing with how many retrieved hosting horror stories we’ve had to help people fix over the years. I can’t even think of how many that has been.

So with that said, if you need help with your website, whether that be cheap hosting, poor quality, unreliability, spam issues or you’re getting hacked, drop us a line at web3.com.au.

We can help you get set up with infrastructure that will not let you down.

So with that said and done, we will wrap up another episode of the Web3 marketing debate show. For the next episode, we’ll be talking about all things SEM and SEO-related software.

Stay tuned and we will talk to you again real soon.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Marketing Debate show. If you liked it, please give us a positive rating on your preferred podcasting platform.

Here are the most recent previous episodes:

And here’s the very next episode: Google Search Console Vs. SEMrush

Premium Vs. Shared Hosting: Which is better for your marketing efforts?