I always recommend having a blog if you are serious about making money online. It does not matter if you want to be a blogger or not.
One of the first decisions is the type of hosting you’ll use. Without it, you don’t have a website at all. Web hosting allows your website to be online.
Shared hosting gives you a workable option when you’re first starting. Cheap web hosting fits your tight budget and is easy to use.
But the limitations of sharing a server can make it less effective if you have a high-traffic website.
Digging deeper to understand the pros and cons of cheap web hosting to help you fully choose the best hosting option.
Why do you need cheap web hosting?
A shared hosting plan may offer the resources you need when starting your website. It’s a cheap way to get started and can usually keep up with your traffic.
But as your traffic increases, you may outgrow the plan. Your site may take longer to load as traffic increases, especially at peak traffic times.
What Is Shared Hosting?
A website needs hosting to live online. The server is what provides the hosting. Shared hosting uses one server for multiple websites, sometimes hundreds or thousands of sites.
All of those websites share the resources of the server. Each site on the server has a limit on how much of the resources it can use. That helps spread the resources around to all sites.
The Pros of Cheap Webhosting
Shared hosting plans are ideal for small businesses, personal websites, and others with low to moderate traffic. You get the following benefits if you fall into that category.
Lower Cost
The best thing about shared web hosting is that it is cheap. You can get started for less than $2 per month, which is cheap enough to test things around, and if you start making money, you can move to the better hosting plans.
Easy to Get Started
Most cheap web hosting is designed for beginners. They provide you with every app and tool you need to set up your website.
Little Technical Knowledge Required
You do not need IT knowledge to use shared hosting; you will get a one-click install to install WordPress or any other content management system.
Variety of Plan Options
Depending on your project, you can choose hosting for a single or multiple websites. This gives you an option depending on how many websites you want to host.
Access to Various Software
Depending on what you want to do, there is software for it. Do you want to build a blog? An e-commerce store? A forum?
There is a software for it. The best part is that most of these software are free, and you can access all of this inside your shared web hosting.
Availability of Support
Most web hosting will provide you with email support. Usually, it is not the fastest, but there will be someone there who can help you when things do not work with your hosting account.
The Cons of Cheap Webhosting
Although cheap web hosting has some pros, it also has some heavy cons, so I do not recommend it unless you are under the budget.
Limitations of Resources
One of the main reasons web hosting companies can offer cheap services is that they will provide the least resources.
They will give you less space, RAM, and support. They will do everything to give you the minimum resources possible.
Potential Security Issues
Since they want to reduce costs to make their business model profitable, most companies with shared hosting plans will not invest in state-of-the-art malware detection systems and firewalls. This will expose your website to online hackers.
Three years ago, my blog was hacked, making me $100 a day. The hosting company I was using refused to help me disinfect the site.
The good news is that I could recover the site using the backup files. But the impact was strong.
It lost Google rankings. I was never able to recover the traffic, and still, to this day, it is struggling to make $1 per month.
Difficulty of Scaling
Shared hosting is designed for specific groups of people. When you start getting out of that category, you must change the plan or the web hosting.
They are not easy to scale; usually, the best solution is to move and find a different hosting company.
They are slow
Website speed is very important to your business. If a mobile site doesn’t load in three seconds, 53% of mobile users abandon the page. For every additional second, it takes to load, your website loses more people.
That means a slow website costs you money. You lose out on sales or a potential audience when your pages load slowly.
Sometimes, outgrowing shared hosting is a matter of needing more customization. You might want greater security or custom software solutions.
Less Customization
Since they want you to use the minimum resources possible, they will ensure you do not have many options to customize your hosting plan.
Less Control
There is not much you can do with shared hosting. Usually, you can install a few applications and plugins. If you install many of them, they will negatively impact the website’s performance.
Who Should Use Cheap Web Hosting?
Ideal candidates for cheap web hosting are smaller websites without much traffic. Your hosting company will inform you if traffic takes up too much of the server’s resources.
It’s also a good option if you’re looking for a website on a budget. The affordability lets you have a website without massive financial investments.
Cheap web hosting is ideal when you need a fairly basic website. You may have difficulty getting it with shared hosting if you want many custom features or advanced options.
Cheap hosting is also a good option if you don’t have a lot of security concerns. You may seek a more secure hosting option if your company has security concerns.
FAQ: Cheap web hosting
When is the time to move from Cheap web hosting?
My rule is that if you start getting more than 200 visitors daily, It is time to move away from the shared hosting plans and find yourself a dedicated hosting plan.
What is the best cheap web hosting company?
Namecheap is the best cheap hosting company, and you can get started with less than $23 in the first year. Get your hosing plan here.
What is the best web hosting?
WPX is the best web hosting, and you can get started here.
Key takeaways about cheap web hosting
Cheap web hosting is ideal when you need a fairly basic website. You may have difficulty getting it with shared hosting if you want many custom features or advanced options.
Cheap hosting is also a good option if you don’t have a lot of security concerns. You may seek a more secure hosting option if your company has security concerns.