Cheap Web Hosting – Is The Saving Worth It?

As most businesses took a break over the festive period of 2018/2019, some businesses were facing customer complaints about their websites and surprisingly it wasn’t for being outdated or having wrong information but for having no information or not being available at all.

These failures by hosting companies can have huge impacts on a business’ bottom line, especially in the typically quiet months of January / February.

KLB systems offers hosting from $10 per month and website design at a reasonable rate. While some people might see $10 per month as expensive with offers out there for as low as $2.50 per month in some cases, we offer a customer who pays $100 per month the same tools and access as someone who pays $10 per month. The main difference between our hosting levels being the amount you can store on your website and the number of databases.

With KLB systems hosting from $10 a month you get:

  • Access to cPanel management
  • Weekly backups & restore (which doesn’t count towards your data storage quota)
  • Unlimited e-mail addresses
  • Full domain name management
  • Access to optimisation tools when running your website on WordPress
  • 99.6% uptime (based on November 2017 – November 2018 statistics)
  • Easy to access support to assist should you have an issue with your website not being accessible
  • Plus heaps more

What does your $2.50 a month host get you? 

We recently converted a customer from $2.50 hosting. The back end the customer had access to required a high level of IT knowledge to manage it and was not clear exactly where to change files, settings and much more. We have moved them across to our platform for $10 a month and they now have a very user friendly experience with cPanel.

Another customer on cheap hosting had their entire site removed from the server and their domain name pointed to another business, luckily not in competition, however as they do bookings for both food and accommodation through their website, the total cost to them could have been worth thousands while it was offline. In this instance the hosting company denied it was their fault and only after consistent contact from the customer and the customer liaising with us for information to prove it was the hosting companies fault, did they finally do a restore of the account.

Expensive Doesn’t Always Equal Good

At the same time as saying that you get what you pay for, be careful of companies that will gouge you just because your core business is not web hosting & webdesign. As we write this, we are currently working to recover a customers website which the hosting company has pointed to another companies website and the original registrar used their own personal e-mail address to register the domain which has caused issues in itself to help this customer, so it will take a longer process to recover, all the while they were paying exorbitant fees for this to happen!

How Do These Failures Happen?

Quite simply, not paying attention and not testing the configurations when moving websites between servers.

KLB systems undertook a major change of backend hosting providers in November 2017 and we worked for 3 months moving our customers across in gradual stages. We did it in the following steps:

  1. Added customer account to new server
  2. Setup DNS and hosting services on new server
  3. Ensured all DNS records were transferred across including sub domains, redirects, mail records, etc
  4. Tested DNS and hosting resolution on new server
  5. Restored most recent snapshot of the customer’s website to new server
  6. Restored most recent snapshot of the customer’s mail folders where applicable to the new server
  7. Tested the new server configuration to ensure website
  8. Tested the new server configuration sending and receiving e-mail
  9. Liaised with customer for best time to switch to the new server for less interruptions to the business
  10. Updated existing DNS servers to point to the new servers
  11. Updated the registrar records for the domain name to point to the new DNS servers
  12. Restored most recent snapshot of the customer’s mail folders where applicable to the new server
  13. Tested everything again to ensure resolution and usage to new servers
  14. Confirmed with customer that everything was still working for them
  15. Decommissioned old hosting service for customer
  16. Removed customer off the “to move” list and to the “moved” list to ensure we didn’t miss any of our customer

Get in touch today to see how we can help move you onto more reliable hosting and a refresh on your website if you need it!