Why cheap VPS hosting costs you more money

The most effective mindset when shopping for VPS hosting, is to first realize it’s importance. It’s uncommon to spend months or years doing research to find the best fit. Although what can be more important to the health of your web based business than the best VPS hosting?

The cost of a hasty decision when choosing a VPS host, can be incalculable.

Common outcomes from choosing the wrong host:

• Your customers will lose trust in you
• Loss of business revenue
• Loss of important data

These are usually a result of a major problem at the hosting provider. For example, when for some strange reason servers go offline or backups fail. The host might not even be able to explain the problem.

We interviewed a customer who was in the process of searching for new hosting. We wanted to learn about how he was choosing the next host for his business. He was one of the rare shoppers, who spent years off and on looking. He had tested many providers, to find one that fit his needs.

Here’s what made him pass on most Windows VPS hosting providers:

• Many promises up front, but failed to deliver
• Didn’t listen & understand his needs
• No support or inconvenient times when specialized help was available

This can apply to Windows VPS, cPanel VPS or Linux VPS hosting.

Cheap hosting isn’t limited to price

It can be the businesses practices or features of the hosting provider that don’t put the service in your favor.

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Cheap price doesn’t always mean you will suffer an outage. Hosting that doesn’t fully meet your specific needs, can cost you thousands of dollars in time and frustration.

These can be hidden time wasting tasks costing you, or your team hours:

• Manually configuring servers (virtual private, or bare metal)
• Manually tweaking settings for each domain
• Manually resetting services during test or higher traffic times
• Monitoring ping, cpu, ram and disk space
• No support, or slow support (both are about the same)

You can be sure a hosting provider is a good fit by testing them first. The customer mentioned above engaged many providers to find the right one. That’s not a bad idea, but here’s a checklist you can use to make this much faster.

Checklist to eliminate the cheap VPS hosting options

1. Do they offer the minimum required hosting for my application(s).
2. Does it seem like they listen to my needs?
3. Does their control panel feel intuitive or clunky?
4. Can I easily adjust or reset what I need from their control panel?
5. Do I get fast support from a live person at different times of the day/night?
6. How often are my servers backed up, and how do I do a restore?

Bonus: If I want to change or expand and need a different hosting technology, can they accommodate?

[Tweet “Hosting that doesn’t fully meet your specific needs, can cost you thousands of dollars in time and frustration.”]

If you use this criteria to carefully make your decision it will keep you from settling with a cheap hosting provider. We want you to have the best chance to succeed with your business. If you would like to give our VPS hosting a try, consult with us first at no cost, and no pressure, here’s the link.

Categories: Developers, Hosting