We often get asked, “how much should I be paying for web hosting?” It’s a good question – and it all comes down to three basic principles: Performance, Reliability and Customer Service.
Sure, if you scour the web you’ll find shared hosting available for as low as £0.99 per month. It’s likely someone upselling server farm hosting in the USA from their back bedroom and I can guarantee when things go wrong, they’ll go disastrously wrong.
Then we’ve got the second tier web hosting for around £3 per month, again we need to look at these retailers. Let’s reflect on what happened a couple of years ago, when some server tech of -a very large UK “stack ‘em high sell them low” hosting supplier accidently ran a Linux RM command, something that’s difficult to do if they were running the latest hardware and software but that would add expense. They erased several VPS servers, including backups, leaving lots of businesses without websites and emails for a week.
Most of us are quite willing to spend £30-£50 per month on a mobile phone contract, so you have to ask yourself, “Is my online presence/business really only worth the cost of a cup coffee?” When you put things into perspective, web hosting like hosted emails is most often one of the most overlooked areas of a business.
Each area of hosting from budget to premium has its place, but if you’re serious about your business and your website is an important asset then it’s an area that really shouldn’t be skimped on.
We offer all our customers a bespoke hosting solution built around their website needs and we appreciate that every customers goal is different. But one thing that is consistent across all our hosting packages is we only use UK data centres, offer a QOS, include website backups and secure access via HTTPS as standard.
So whether you need scalable resources for those busier periods or increased reliability via the use of load balancers we can create a solution suitable for everyone.
What are the costs?
For a typical small business our shared hosting prices start from £10+VAT per month and that has proven to blow the socks off any “stack it high sell it low” hosting company. Prices then go up from there depending on site resources and special requests. If you’d like us to audit your website and advise on hosting then please feel free to contact us on 0161 327 2131 | www.nwdesign.co and don’t forget our hosting includes free site migration and site optimisation.
