Four Ways That Bad Web Hosting Can Mess Up Your Site

What’s the easiest way for your website to fail?  Sign up with a bad web host and you won’t need need to do much else.  Not all cheap web hosting providers are bad.  It’s just that many of them are and they can destroy your labor of love in more ways than one.

1. Downtimes

When your site goes down, it means:

• You can’t access it
• Search engines can’t spider it
• Users can’t see it
• Customers can’t purchase from it

Basically, you’re missing potential sales, getting in the bad graces of the search engines and possibly losing users.  If your website experiences frequent downtimes, you’ll suffer through all those regularly.  Don’t let it!

2. Backups

No matter how good your web hosting is, crashes happen.  When they do, years of  hardwork on your site all goes down the drain.  Of course, keeping backups should primarily be your job.  In the event that things go awry, though, good web hosts should be able to help you with restoring your site from their own current mirrors.  Bad hosts will just tell you, “We’re sorry, backups aren’t part of our offer.”

3. Lack of Communication

Service companies should inform you any time changes are made on their end that can affect whatever work they’re doing for you.  Bad hosting companies will just leave you in the dark.  They’re moving your account to a different box?  They won’t even make a peep.  They’re installing a new version of Apache on your server?  You won’t even know about it.  You’ll just open your  site one day to find it’s not running or that your script is giving off errors.

4. Bad Support Infrastructure

You can learn a lot from a company by the way their helpdesk responds to customers?  Are they dismissive?  Do they answer queries defensively?  Can you ask them questions and not get treated like a 6-year old?  When problems happen, bad support will leave you all on your own, with no one to turn to.