The website is one of the most important elements for a business: it represents the point of reference for potential customers on the web. It helps to communicate the identity of your brand.
Does A Cheap Website Correspond To Cheap Hosting?
One of the elements necessary to create a site is hosting, i.e. a web space that hosts your site and makes it usable online at any time. This service is provided by hosting providers, each allowing you to ‘rent’ a web space with different solutions, conditions and costs. Some providers allow you to buy hosting at a reduced price or even get free.
A cheap website will probably rely on an equally cheap hosting service. This is a very important factor to consider if you want to create a professional website: hosting is the service that allows your site to be present and accessible online. It contains all the associated files and the database. Consequently, it must be quality.
What Are The Risks Associated With Cheap Hosting?
Inadequate And Limited Assistance
Regarding website management, problems are often around the corner, and a 24/7 assistance service is essential. When you decide to rely on cheap hosting solutions, you are aware that the web assistance service will often need to be improved, with limited hours and long waiting times. In these cases, if your site goes down for any reason, resolving the problem could take many hours. Meanwhile, your web space would not be visible online, with all the consequences of the case, including a certain negative impact on performance and your image.
Slowness
Speed is a key element to ensuring good performance of your site. This is not only because the user tends to abandon the site when faced with an excessive loading time but also because it represents an important positioning factor on search engines. Very often, hosting providers that provide particularly cheap offers provide services that need more resources to guarantee good performance in loading speed. As a result, your site could be very slow, and when you try to contact support for clarification, you could find yourself in the situation we discussed above.
Few Guarantees In Terms Of Security
One last very important factor to consider is safety. A good hosting plan generally includes additional services such as daily backup and malware and virus scanning. If you decide to go for a cheap website, likely, your hosting will not include these types of guarantees. If you lose data, you will be fine falling back on a low-cost solution.
Also Read: What Is The Difference Between Hosting And Domain?
Low-Cost Website: Goodbye Customization
Almost all websites rely on a CMS ( Content Management System ), content management system. Also, in this case, the offer in terms of services and associated costs is very broad: one can resort to completely customized applications specially developed for a specific company, up to Open Source software. Among these, there are very good solutions, such as WordPress. These are Open Source CMS whose functions can be extended through free or paid ‘plugins’. The functions offered by the platform in its free version are standard and limited.
Still, by installing additional software, it is possible to expand the potential of the CMS and have different types of customization available suitable for any site. When buying a cheap website, you will probably be dealing with a limited content management system that provides basic functionality. In this case, your customization opportunities will be very limited; you cannot choose what to insert on your site freely, but you will have to adapt the contents to the few functions you will have available. Certainly, this could also be a solution if your goal is to build a ‘personal’ site.
But when your business needs something more professional, such as a blog or e-commerce, relying on free or very cheap systems won’t be enough to get a good result. The same goes for templates, i.e. the set of files that define the layout and graphics of your site. Also, in this case, the offer is extremely varied. The possibility of obtaining tailor-made templates, resorting to paid and highly customizable themes, or falling back on completely free ones. The danger of being tempted by the offers of cheap websites is finding yourself working with a free, non-customizable, non-customizable template.
The result? A website with a basic and anonymous interface is similar to many other online pages. Considering that the website should represent your ‘online business card’, not being able to distinguish yourself from the competition is a bad thing. Even worse is being able to be compared, in terms of layout, to other businesses that deal with activities completely different from yours. In short, there are better decisions than a cheap website to have a good degree of customization.
Usability And Responsiveness
When low-cost websites are used, there is the danger that they need to be correctly designed to be responsive, i.e. such that the layout can automatically adapt to navigation on different types of devices. To date, most users navigate from mobile. Therefore your responsive site must perform well on screens of different formats and sizes! Accessing a web page and needing help viewing the contents or navigating discourages the user, who is led to leave the site.
This is exactly the opposite of what you should aspire to, which is to be able to keep the user on our site as much as possible. In this regard, it is important that your web space has a good level of usability . But what does it mean? Web usability concerns the effectiveness of the interaction between the user and the web interface: the simpler and more intuitive navigation is, the better the user experience will be. The aim is to minimize the cognitive effort required to use the contents on the site; this also helps to improve its performance!
Cheap Website: Do You Save Money?
If you are convinced to turn to systems that offer the possibility of creating a website for free or to professionals who can create it for you at a bargain price, pay close attention. As we have analyzed in the previous paragraphs, having a good hosting space, registering a top-level domain, or having a good customizable template at a negligible cost is impossible. Consequently, when you purchase, pay close attention to the conditions provided!
It’s common for these services to be inexpensive for a limited time, requiring you to pay monthly binding fees to keep your site up and running. In this way, you will likely end up with a much higher overall final expense than the investment that a professional in the sector would have asked you to create a professional website.
Also Read: 5 Tricks To Optimize Your Website And Position Better
