Posted by Jerry in Cheap hosting does not always suck, but in most cases it does. Why it is so has many reasons and here are few common ones:
Rushed Servers
The cheap packages wrapped into ‘unlimited resources’ wrappers attract almost everyone. Everyone wants to have an ‘all in one’ pack, and so the servers get rushed with too many sites on them resulting as poor server response time. Sometimes cheap hosting companies have hundreds of servers, and it’s your luck which one you get. You may get the buggiest one.
Bad Neighborhood Via Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is like a public place where everyone is unknown to you. You don’t know the person next to you, and a virus injection to any other site on the server may cause a serious damage to your site as well.
Email Issues
Since cheap hosting attracts everyone, the spammers love to have it, and due to their activities, it’s very possible that your host is blacklisted. Once your host is blacklisted, your emails get affected badly.
Unclear TOS
Not all cheap web hosting companies, but many of them have unclear TOS, so before having a deal with any of them, make sure that you understand their TOS and these are acceptable for you. And if you find TOS unclear, never ever go for that hosting company, it’ll suck for sure.
Bad Support
The biggest dilemma of cheap web hosting companies is that due to huge user base, the response time is poor. The tickets are mostly replied after long hours, and in case if the communication over ticket is not effective it may take days. Other than this their hold time is quite long, and this really sucks.
Cheap hosting definitely sucks, but this is not the fault at hosting companies’ end, instead it’s your own. If you research a little before going blindly after a cheap web host, examine their site, understand TOS, talk to them and clear things before any deal, cheap hosting can do well for you, and will not suck at all!
Hi,
I agree with this totally and I use very good cheap hosting without problems because I do my due diligence first. In my experience it take at least 3 days to find good cheap hosting but more like a week because even when you find it you don’t always know until you have looked at everything else first.
They all state stuff like $3.50, unlimited hosting, unlimited bandwidth, then when you start reading carefully looking at what the related footnotes mean connected to the symbols at the end of some sentences you find out that it is only available if you sign up for 3 years. The real price is $8.95 if you want to pay on a month by month bases the problem is if you sign up for 3 years and they are a poor service you are stuck with them.
The reality in my experience is this, if you do your due diligence there are some very good deals and services out there at good prices but you do have to look at them very closely.
Gareth
Don t sign up with ipage. This service really sucks. My website was all days down – really all days! 5-10 times and always slow. The support is horrible because nobody can help you and they answer the same phrases. Maybe they have a list and only copy a phrase.
i signed up with ipage and later complained about the fact my site was down sometimes. the reply back was that, “it’s working now”. things have been fined up until today again when the time outs came back. really, i’m glad i only signed up for one year.