Is Your Web Hosting Company Sabotaging Your Blog?

You’re publishing really compelling content on your blog and starting to build a loyal following. However, you seem to have hit a plateau and can’t get over a certain hump for traffic, even though your social shares are growing.

How would you feel if we told you that your hosting company might be to blame? The truth of the matter is that that happens and is the case way more than you think.

Despite all of the cheap hosting that is available today, you’re always best to pay a little bit more for optimized hosting solutions for your blog. Otherwise, you may be setting yourself up to fail.

Cheap Hosting Could Be Costing You More than You Think

Did you spend more on a latte than you spent on a year’s worth of web hosting? You might not really be setting your blog up for success.

Simply put, cheap hosts often doesn’t have the bandwidth to support your blog’s growth. In fact, they can stand directly in the way of your growth. These hosts target people who are just looking for “good enough” hosting to get by. You can do better than that. You need to do better than that.

Cheap hosts simply do not have the resources or facilities to handle a lot of traffic. Their business is built on the assumption that they will be hosting a few sites with a modest amount of traffic.

If these websites (including a blog like yours) see a sudden spike in traffic, that presents a problem for them and an even bigger problem for you.

Getting Throttled

Your traffic spike now means that your host is going to throttle your site’s bandwidth allotment, which means your site is about to experience a serious drop in load speed.

And the more people who try to access your site, the slower it will be.

This feels like the ultimate slap in the face. You’ve worked hard to create great content, and the second it starts to earn some decent traction, the rug gets pulled out from under you.

And to make it sting worse your host is the one who pulled it.

Misleading Marketing

Of course, there is no mention of this throttling in a would-be cheap host’s marketing materials. A lot of the time, they can create a compelling case and convince you that they’re just as good as a more expensive hosting provider.

But you can’t really trust their uptime statistics. They may quote something impressive-sounding like 99.999% uptime rates. However, be cautious because these statistics do not tell you that your blog being “up” includes the deliberate slowdown we mentioned above.

This uptime also does not generally factor in the unpredictable times where your site is performing so poorly that it might as well be down. It’s technically up, and will eventually load after 5-10 seconds. However, you will have already lost most of your traffic by then.

Research by Google has found that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds. Slow speeds caused by the wrong or a poor choice of web hosting company and hosting plan will absolutely kill your blog.

So, make sure that you’re with a reputable hosting company that has the facilities and equipment to facilitate your success. They should want you to earn more traffic, not stand in your way.

Great web hosting companies will promise, and deliver, on a very high percentage of uptime. They will give you even more options, like enhanced security measures, reliable backups, unlimited quotas, and round the clock top-tier customer support.

Moreover, great web hosting will offer different packages to suit different needs and easy package upgrades to support businesses as they grow. All this while they will continually strive to increase the speed of the sites they host. And that may ultimately reflect in their pricing. 

Otherwise, “cheap” can be very expensive.