10 Reasons to Avoid Cheap Hosting for WordPress Websites.

Should you, however, go with the Avoid Cheap Hosting for WordPress Websites?

For starters, are expensive hosting solutions overkill?

These are just a few of the questions that may come to mind when choosing a web hosting provider for your WordPress website, especially if you don’t want to spend a lot of money to get started with WordPress.

Choosing a cheap web host for your WordPress site, on the other hand, may not be the best option.

Here, I’ll go through a few of the reasons for this, which should help you make an informed decision about which hosting service to use for your WordPress site.

Also, if you’ve never built a WordPress site before, I recommend reading the beginner’s guide to WordPress website building and exploring our WordPress resources.

As attractive as it may appear on paper, the server provided by low-cost hosting options often has severe resource limitations.

Whether it is the bandwidth limit, memory limit, storage limit, or anything else, you may end up using the quota limit quickly, especially if you do not know the system requirements for a WordPress site.

WordPress is a powerful content management system; it lets you equip your website with several functionalities. You can’t use them because of the server’s limited resources.

Ultimately, you will have to make compromises to ensure that your website works as expected.

Can you, however, expect a reasonable amount of server resources at a decent cost?

Yes, absolutely.

For novices, you should choose some shared hosting services, which are not pricey (if not the cheapest).

You may use some of the best tools to measure website load time to analyze your website’s current performance. Of course, you may boost the performance of your WordPress site by using simple WordPress optimizations.

However, there are a few things out of your control that could be affecting the website performance:

• Does the server use a Solid-State Drive (SSD) for storage?
• Do you have a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in place?
• Where is the server located?
• Back-end software stack optimization

When it comes to a low-cost hosting option, however, they frequently use a server with a hard disc drive, do not optimize the back end, and may not provide the closest server location for your use case.

All of this, along with limited server resources, makes your website slow, irrespective of how well you optimize it.

And this can affect your blog/business big time:

• In terms of user experience (where your visitors leave your website and never come back)
• Negative SEO effects (considering Google is inclining towards ranking websites that load faster)

As a result, a cheap web host is never an option for reliable website performance.

While it could be acceptable to have a subpar performance, it certainly makes no sense if you (or your visitors) cannot access your website, right?

After utilizing a cheap hosting option for a while, many people realize this. Things may appear to be in order at first, but if you keep a close eye on your website, you may realize that it is not always accessible.

When you sign up for a cheap WordPress hosting plan, you are aware that you will suffer continuous downtime. To analyze this, you might select to monitor website uptime.

There are, of course, downtimes even with premium WordPress website hosting options. You just can’t predict it. However, the probability of downtime is much lower.

The downtime should not be an issue unless you are simply experimenting with WordPress to learn/explore. But, in every other case, constantly having downtimes can affect your website (or business).

Suppose you get good value for your money in terms of results and downtime.

How about customer service?

When you have a technical or billing issue, what do you do?

How do they handle that?

If you wish to evaluate the support quality, keep the following elements:

• Can they help you fix an error on your website?
• Do they fix the error for you, or do they tell you to fix it?
• How long does it take for their support team to respond to your problems?

Surprisingly, hundreds of web hosting services fail to provide adequate customer support (even with high-tier plans). And the low-cost hosting options are much worse.

They may be able to solve some common problems, but you may have to wait in a long line for help, and the technicians may not be skilled enough to fix other concerns.

Moreover, you will not have access to 24/7 support, which means you will lose valuable time if your WordPress site has an error.

Time is money — I had to write that idiom (sigh). So, going for a cheap hosting provider could waste your time unnecessarily.

When using a product or service to troubleshoot issues on your own, whether you’re a newbie or an expert, you’ll need proper documentation.

The documentation provided may not be useful when it comes to a low-cost hosting service (or outdated). Worse, they can not provide self-help documentation.

Nowadays, almost every hosting company provides a backup.

In the case of a cheaper alternative, you may not find the choice for daily backups or the ability to restore backups easily.

If you’re actively working on your website, you’ll most likely be making changes on a regular basis. In the event of a disaster, you may not be able to recover the most recent version of your website without real-time or daily backups.

Furthermore, you will find that WordPress backup plugins do not function well with low-cost hosting plans. You can technically put them in place. But your server does not meet the minimum resource requirements — which is highly likely for a cheap WordPress hosting plan.

Assume you’ve already bought the lowest hosting package available. So you can simply upgrade your plan to suit your site’s increasing traffic?

Isn’t that supposed to solve your problems?

Well, I’m sorry to break it to you, but most low-cost hosting services may not be scalable enough to suit your needs in the future. Even if they do, you may need to manually move your WordPress website, which they may not be able to assist you with.

As a result, for futureproofing, you should use cloud hosting platforms or Managed WordPress hosting.

While decent web hosting options might be pricey, they often come with a number of attractive features (such as free SSL, free daily backups, free malware removal, and so on).

On the contrary, the cheaper options may prove to be dodgy enough to ask for extra payment for basic features that other providers offer for free. And, as a result, you may find up paying more for the hosting plan you first believed was “cheap.”

Not just that, due to resource limitations on your server, you could have to pay for exceeding resource usage — which is not advertised when you make the purchase.

Considering the rise of cybersecurity issues every year, securing your WordPress website is important.

Even if you believe your website is insignificant, you might be the subject of a malicious attack.

Of course, the amount of protection needed varies depending on the type of website (eCommerce, blog, portfolio, etc.). However, most low-cost hosting plans do not include the bare minimum of security features.

They may claim to have security features, but if you want to keep your website safe from hackers, don’t believe what they say.

Combining all of the reasons mentioned, there is one more thing you should be prepared for: waking up to find your website gone.

Yes, it is possible for shady hosting services to ignore your website or fail to maintain and update the server on a regular basis.

Automatic redundant backups, security scans, and regular maintenance are all performed by reliable hosts. And that is well worth spending instead of having no clue of what happened to your website.

Choosing the most costly WordPress hosting package might not be the best choice. But opting for the cheapest plan to save money is not fruitful either.

You might not notice any problems with your hosting company at first, but if it was a super-cheap deal, you might run into problems shortly. So, you need to evaluate your hosting requirements and analyze where your hosting provider stands, considering all the key factors listed above. Then choose the best choice for your WordPress website.

Building a WordPress website is simple, but there is a learning curve that develops with your needs. Patience is the key, and I’m sure now you know what to do when choosing a web hosting platform for your WordPress site. If you ask me, I would recommend InMotion Hosting, GreenGeeks, Nexcess, and WPX for business sites.