Budget hosting offers enticingly cheap initial costs, but comes with hidden risks and trade-offs. How do budget hosts offer such cheap prices, and what compromises might come with them?
Low monthly fees are an obvious draw of budget hosting providers. But only looking for the cheapest solution can mean you miss underlying limitations and issues which impact business continuity, future costs, user experience, and security. The reality is that budget hosting often ends up costing more in the long run.
The hidden trade-offs of budget hosting
Budget hosting services advertise ‘bargain’ prices, which can be initially appealing. However, what they don’t advertise is that the ways they keep their costs so low mean customers need to make compromises.
Shared resources and security risks
Budget hosting will nearly always be multi-tenant, with customers sharing their infrastructure with potentially hundreds or even thousands of other customers on the same server. Multi-tenant infrastructure can be safely run if environments are fully isolated, and sufficient resources are allocated to each user. This is often not the case with cheap hosting, where, to cut costs, resources are shared between too many users, leading to low performance, and not safely isolated, leading to security risks.
Shared environments run the risk of services being compromised in the form of security flaws or malware. Without correct isolation, any sites that share the same server could also be victim to a DDoS attack on a customer, especially if the sites are targeted as they contain sensitive content or material. The costs of a cyber attack or data breach can be considerable, and can easily outweigh any savings from a budget hosting solution.
Limited performance and additional fees
Providers often keep their costs low by limiting resources for customers, including storage, bandwidth and compute power. This is often not clearly disclosed, and means that after signing up to a cheap hosting solution, customers will discover the resources do not meet their requirements. Where there is an option to increase resources, this will generally come with additional costs for the customer. Similarly, there are other hidden fees and chances for the provider to upsell on the initial package, for things such as website migrations, domain registrations, and dedicated IP addresses.
Poor service and lack of support
Support and management will generally be minimal with this hosting approach. Budget providers’ business models require that they host a vast quantity of customers, each paying a low fee. Due to the cost of employing and training costs, each employee will be responsible for a high number of platforms in order for the company to remain in profit. The staff to customer ratio therefore does not work out in the customer’s favor, leading to a lack of access to support. Additionally, there will generally be no management included, meaning the day-to-day running of the environment needs to be managed by the customer.
Lack of flexibility and scalability
Budget hosting solutions will usually be ‘one-size-fits-all’. This means you will not be able to customize the configuration, specifications, or resource allocation. For certain projects, such as hosting static sites without many pages, or for individual hosting needs, this could be suitable. However, for enterprises, this won’t be sufficient, as there is no option for scaling resources or increasing capacity as business needs develop.
Even if the budget hosting platform meets your needs initially, it is important to consider that it will likely not meet your needs in the future, and you will need to either pay higher fees to the provider for increased capacity, or migrate to another provider.
Why managed hosting offers better long-term value
Paying so little for an integral service that keeps your website online and stores your data is a risky option, especially as you are sharing the server with so many other businesses. You will always end up compromising on at least one aspect, whether this is security, performance, scalability, or service. While the initial cost may seem attractive, these compromises can ultimately cost you more in the long run.
Our managed hosting offers an alternative, giving you proactive management and support, bespoke, flexible solutions, and predictable costs.
As a managed service provider, Hyve can offer the highest level of service and responsive support, and significantly better support ratios than budget hosting. This means our engineers truly get to know your platform and provide genuine value through expert management.
Our solutions are tailored to your specific needs, meaning we can host your workloads in an optimized and efficient environment. This maximizes your performance and the value you receive from your solution.
Our platforms, both single and multi-tenant, offer full isolation and high levels of security, ensuring your sites, applications and data will be protected.
What next?
When it comes to cloud hosting, cost should never be the only factor. Cheap hosting may look good on paper, but the hidden compromises could cost you far more in the long run. A managed hosting solution balances performance, flexibility and customization, with a team of experts supporting you to optimize your resources.
Need a managed cloud hosting provider that can support your business? Fill out our contact form and one of our cloud experts will get in touch.
