One way of making sure your business – be it big or small – turns a profit at the end of each fiscal year is by cutting all unnecessary costs, or as they call it in the business world, by cost-saving. Every single cent you manage to keep from spending will add to the revenue you’re making and contribute towards a healthy year-end balance.

But, as you probably know, there is a big difference between cutting costs and simply being cheap. This, unfortunately, applies to the webhosting provider you have chosen too.

Below we will see the main differences between an “affordable” hosting solution and a “cheap” one:

Terminologies

Let us start out by defining what is meant by “affordable” and “cheap”. In the case of affordable hosting it is meant that you will be getting the same quality of service at a bargain price, but with perhaps a reduced number of features than you would have if you were to pay more.

With cheap hosting you will pay peanuts and get the same in terms of features and quality of service – peanuts.

The Web hosting Providers

Webhosting providers that offer affordable hosting packages or solutions are usually well-established entities in their fields of service. They have, over the years or through a great marketing strategy, been able to garner a large number of customers and can therefore afford to lower their prices and still turn a profit.

In other words, their prices are low because their costs are spread over a large customer base.

When it comes to cheap webhosting solutions, you are being “suckered” in by a company that wants to attract customers who are only looking at the cents they will have to pay for their hosting services and not realizing that there really isn’t much behind the “cheap webhosting” advertisements they are bombarded with. It will usually end up being a costly mistake.

Availability of Resources

Webhosting prices have become so competitive these days that providers which offer affordable prices also offer unlimited or “unmonitored” resources. You can use as much bandwidth and disk space as is deemed reasonable (don’t expect to run an online gaming website on a $0.50 per month package) and you won’t be charged extra for it.

The cheap hosting provider will have strict limits on everything, and if you dare pass those limits you are promptly asked to pay up.

Availability of Tools

Any webhosting provider today will make sure that you create, manage and administer your website with ease. There are so many website building and management tools out there that you can choose from and your provider will probably offer the best ones on the market for free.

With the cheap provider you will either get website building tools that are outdated or are too hard to master; or you will be asked to pay extra for the latest software.

Server Uptimes

As we mentioned earlier, the companies that offer affordable webhosting solutions aren’t cutting back on their services. For one, they don’t have to lower their server uptime expectations because there are too many clients on them. When they run out of resources they simply upgrade them. This means there is minimum downtime – something that is critical for businesses that need to have their websites up and running at all times.

That story is quite different when it comes to cheap hosting providers. To be honest, they themselves are running on a tight budget (maybe even tighter than yours) and need to squeeze a 100 percent or, hopefully, more out of every resource – which will save them money but cost you a lot.

A server with too many clients on it will have a slow response time and, when it is overloaded, will inevitably crash. You can’t afford to have that happening to you on a regular basis.

Customer Support

An affordable hosting provider will have the resources to hire the necessary customer support staff. They will pay for employees that know their stuff and there will be enough of them to care for you, the client, at any given time of the day.

A cheap hosting provider will really be the source of your problems. If you are able to get a hold of them, or manage to pry a reply to your ticket from them, it will either be too vague to even begin to address your problem or it will simply have nothing to do with it at all.

Eventually, after you have been given the run-around, you will be told that there is simply no solution to your problem or you will have already switched to another provider out of sheer frustration.

Money Back Guarantees

Affordable webhosting companies know that they will deliver on their promises and have no fear of clients abandoning them mid-subscription. They are confident they will give you all that you could possibly require and should you choose to leave, you would be the exceptional client rather than the majority.

And so, they are not afraid to give you back your money in case you are dissatisfied.

Once you pay a cheap hosting provider the chances of seeing your money again are slim to none. In fact, you would be doing them a favor if you left without taking your money – so they’ll probably want you to do so.

So, there you have it. Take a look at the type of service you are paying for and find out whether you have affordable hosting or cheap hosting.

We hope it’s the former.