How serious are you about the success of your website or blog as a business development tool?
The majority of small business owners I speak with, claim they are serious about the marketing value of their sites, but then they place their sites on cheap hosting plans.
Here’s why this matters: Google now punishes slow sites with lower search rankings!
Google has announced that as of last month, your site will be penalised if it doesn’t load nice and quickly! That’s right, if your site loads slowly, it will now receive a lower search ranking from Google, than a site that loads quickly. This makes the true cost of using cheap web hosting providers a lot easier for people to see.
The true cost of cheap web hosting plans
Long before Google’s shock announcement, cheap web hosting plans were a really bad idea for commercial sites. That’s because no matter how nice your site looks or how good the SEO is, if it loads too slowly, people will NOT hang around and wait. Internet users get really frustrated at having to hang around for pages to load on slow websites. This is definitely not the frame of mind we want people in, if we are about to give them an insight into our business.
Why are so many small business sites so frustratingly slow?
I used to believe it was because the site owners didn’t think it mattered; that cheap web hosting was just an ill-advised, cost saving measure. However, this is certainly not always the case! In many instances, the site owner has no idea how unreliable or slow their site is, because they visit it too infrequently to notice.
Bloggers, for instance, who only blog a few times a month, will often only visit their blog when posting or responding to comments. As a result, they miss well over 99% of their sites performance. The same is true for business owners, who have websites, which are not regularly updated. These sites too can be down or too slow to respond for extended periods, again, without the site owner even knowing. I strongly advise you check out your site regularly and at different times of the day, so you get a more accurate picture of what your prospective customers or clients see.
QUICK TIP
Don’t fall for the “we promise 99% up-time” claims of low end web hosts. In web hosting, 99% is a very poor service. This actually means that they expect your site to be down for 1 full working day every month or down for 3 full working days, every 100 days! What is that worth to you, in lost business, lost enquiries, lost sales?
The bottom line: If you have a commercial site, get it on the most reliable web hosting package you can.
Photo: Jpctalbot
Sure you get what you pay for but just because hosting is expensive doesn’t make it any better. There are definitely extenuating circumstances with any from over-capacity boxes to position on the network, network performance and how you build your site.
The problem with this slow model i that it increasingly encourages resources to be spread over more and more servers which means datacenters will consume more and more power.
There’s a fine line to be trod, that’s for sure.
The other thing is, that people hardly take note of SEO best practices right now let alone notice that they have to keep their site up to speed. So it pretty much makes it irrelevant. Thankfully speed isn’t the only factor int he SEO pie.
Vincent Roman´s last blog ..Building A Recommendation Engine
@Vincent
So we need to ignore SEO and use cheap servers?
Thanks for the comment Vincent.
I would never suggest that someone should move to a new host JUST because it’s more expensive. It’s about using a good provider, who can deliver on your promises. However, companies that charge $5 a month are typically delivering a $5 a month service (if that makes sense?)
Thanks again for the feedback!
I’ve switched servers before I launched my old site and in the middle. The load time was ok but the downtime from my old server made it very unreliable. I think communication is also critical. When another site I was working on went down, we had no communication at all and I had to move it over to a new site at a critical point in the organization’s schedule. It was down 3 days before I could get it all transferred. Reliability and speed are both critical to me.
Julie Walraven | Resume Services´s last blog ..Life is Bittersweet
Hi Julie.
It’s certainly important to have a web host you can communicate with and get help from, when you need it.
That magical balance is a reliable service, with good customer support, for a fair price.
Not too much for us to ask, surely?
Jim agreed about $5 hosting.
The other problem is that when you use apps like wordpress, unless you know how to go in and fix things, you are always going to be at the whims of the software.
Every plugin you install uses its own CSS includes, which isn’t optimal and YSlow et al complains about it.
I agree we need a faster web, but education and resource are the key and not SEO Page Rank, the stick to beat poor webmasters over the head with! And luckily it is only one dynamic.
Vincent Roman´s last blog ..Building A Recommendation Engine
To add extra to my last comment, plugins like Share This and Google Anayltics which draw down files form external hosts can also be a source of slowness, which is annoying. On one hand you are trying to enhance the experience for site users and on the other being penalised for it. And again you are at the mercy of the developers whose plugins you use
Vincent Roman´s last blog ..Building A Recommendation Engine
… and the new Facebook “like” button – which is a pig when it comes to speed at the moment. Really slow.
And this…is why I learn how to build my own stuff.
Of course that’s just not plausible for most bloggers/business owners because a vast majority of them literally refuse to learn time, money, and frustration saving techniques. Something like a “share this post” section can be created without any javascript or even CSS at all. Just simple links and images, which will load faster and can be optimized. *sigh*
Corey Freeman´s last blog ..Can Your Blog Be Too Secure?
You hit the bulls-eye Jim! We see it all the time with some of our ecommerce clients. They have a busy online store, and initially chose a “budget” host and found that their sites were slow, support could not quickly fix issues when they occurred, etc…
Hosting does not have to cost an arm and a leg, but seeing as it’s the foundation to having a successful online business, you do not want that foundation to cost less than a McDonalds value meal.
More important than a few dollars per month difference is finding a host that communicates with its clients, has experts in their support department (instead of reading from a playbook reps), and demonstrates that they really understand your type of business.
It doesn’t work out too well when you save $30/month in hosting fees, but the downtime, slowness, and lack of good support costs your business hundreds or thousands per month.
Rob Mangiafico´s last blog ..It’s Official – Google IS Using Page Load Speed in its Search Ranking Algorithm
Absolutely, Rob.
It’s stunning how much ignorance there is out there, even from some within the industry, regarding the importance of a quick, reliable web host.
A great site on crap server, is like having a Ferrari and running it on corn oil!
Hi Jim,
Great post and point.
Quick question: I have found that changing the theme of my blog has helped with my load time. Is this right or is it still connected to the web-hosting package I have?
Adrian
Adrian Swinscoe´s last blog ..Has the communication needs of you customers changed?
Hello there Adrian. Yes, themes can make a difference, but an even BIGGER difference can be the 3rd party sites that your blog connects to, in order to render a post.
For example, all the images I use in my posts are hosted at flickr.com – which is sometimes a little slow. That can slow things down.
The tweetmeme ReTweet button is also occasionally very slow (which is why I dont use it here).
It’s a big subject.
Any suggestion about a reliable and speed web hosting?
There also a lot of configuration in WordPress in order to speed the site like activate the cache, reduce the amount of querys to the database…
I would highly suggest InMotion. I’ve been with them for about a month and have had zero downtime and the site loads like a dream.
HostGator was pretty good but I still had downtimes which were irritating and support wasn’t as speedy or readily available.
Corey Freeman´s last blog ..Can Your Blog Be Too Secure?
If your website has grown past the hobby stage, and it is now generating all or most of the income for one or more individuals, it is definitely time to start taking website performance and user experience into account. There are many data points that prove that fast, reliable websites have a significant impact on business results. Google’s inclusion of site speed into how Page Rank is calculated is just one more.
And yes, choosing a hosting provider and the appropriate level of resources to host your online presence is absolutely important. Just as important is to truly understand your website performance from the end-user perspective and to not just rely on the very low-level monitoring provided by most hosting companies.
See my blog post about this: http://blog.alertsite.com/2009/08/my-hosting-company-monitors-my-site-dont-they/
Ken Godskind, AlertSite
Ken Godskind´s last blog ..Slow website? Five ways to speed it up
You know what’s interesting/ironic is that the host I’m with now has some of the cheapest rates I’ve seen. (InMotion)
I mean don’t get me wrong, I bought a dedicated server, but I’m curious to see the results of some on a different hosting plan. I know the horrors of cheap shared hosting all too well and I finally invested in a DS because my customers were literally opening support tickets about the site’s slowness/downtime.
Not a good look to rock…
Corey Freeman´s last blog ..Can Your Blog Be Too Secure?
I remember how slow your sites were, Corey. Good that you got it fixed and that you’re happy with the new hosts!
Of course, there’s much more to how fast your site loads than just who your ISP is. Design and coding play a huge part. So many sites are written with bloated, outdated code, or contain large photos that haven’t been optimized, or calls to outside services that don’t respond quickly. I bet a lot of the folks who got the cheapest possible host also put no money into design, and their result is sure to be a slow, ugly mess.
Some very good points there Daniel. Thanks for sharing them here.
Comment from @webright.
We changed from a company offering unlimited space & bandwidth, to one which imposed limits.
Our reasoning? The ‘unlimited’ company offered unlimited space & b/w to EVERYONE. Obviously not everyone takes them up on this, but what it means is they don’t have much control over server loadings.
Our new company imposes limits on all its customers (individuals and resellers), so it knows IN ADVANCE the maximum possible load on the servers.
This means I’m going to get a more reliable service from my new hosting company. Yes, it does cost more (apparently for less space), but I’m getting a faster, fault-free service.
The ‘unlimited’ company was having increasingly frequent outages – “The server was overloaded, but it won’t happen again” – but it did, 4 times before we moved!
The new hosting company helped with a couple of tricky website moves, and their support people have been responsive, and offered good advice when I have a question (which is not a fault).
Another point … they are a smaller company, so the service is more personal. We use this supplier-size-matching approach with our ISP, emailer service, and everywhere we can. And it pays off. More expensive? Yes. Better service? A BIG YES.
I just took a look at your site David, and it loaded extremely quickly – which helps make your point very well. I too use a small company, where the service is excellent. Nothing worse when it comes to web hosts, than bad service. You need your site up and working, right?
Thanks for the comment and your suggestions sir.
Hi, thanks for the post, very interesting and helpful.
Is there any service, do you know, that you can use to test the speed of your blog? For example that could let you know whether it was acceptable, or whether you ought to think about getting a new host.
Hi Tessa – Yes, there are. If you click on the google link in the post, it actually links to a few sites that might be able to help you.
Also if you use Websmater Tools from Google, under the “Labs” category (on the left side of your screen) you will find the “Site performance” option. Here you can see how fast “or slow” is your system compared with the other sites in internet. It is quite usefull to check if you need to do improvements “starting today”.
P.D: as I use the webmaster tools in Spanish, maybe some expressions are not exactly in English as I wrote
the writing has been on the wall for a long time about this, speed of site loading has always been something I strived for, not just from how much KB has to be downloaded but how fast it can get sent. I noticed immediately how quickly I got new pages indexed and how high they ranked the moment my site got hosted on a super fast server.
I should point out something which I learned the hard way..
Uptime guarantees mean nothing, even if it says 100% uptime. It only counts for the server, not the site.
If the server you’re site is on is still running then it doesn’t matter that apache crashed or mysql db ran out of memory, the server is still powered on and classed as ‘up’.
If one of your scripts kills the apache module or you have an infinite loop causing any visit to your site to result in a 503 or 505 server error then when you call to say, “what about the uptime guarantee?” they will tell you that your server is still up. (STFU!) Technical support love it when you try the old uptime guarantee move. No host in the world would guarantee 100% website uptime, unless you had a static page. WordPress blog with custom plugins? nooo waaayy!
If you’re going to run your business online then forget about uptime guarantees. Instead, make sure you have 24 hour technical support that can be contacted by telephone.
Having 24 hour email support and a 100% uptime guarantee will be worthless if your site goes down at 3am. You’ll just have to wait until the morning, meanwhile, the thousands of people who live across the other side of the world who are awake and trying to get to your site will be disappointed until your email finds the right person. And it’s no sure thing that the first person to receive it will fix your problem, there’s no urgency (even if you mark your support ticket as ‘super-urgent’) to fix anything if it’s requested by email.
When my site started getting busy and lots of people used it ALL the time (for fetching commentluv last blog posts) then I got a proper server with a proper management service. It’s a lot more money but, no site = no business.
The fact that I can talk to a techy while he fixes the php4 to php5 upgrade or chmods a file or folder is worth every.single.penny!
I talk about some of the things that I had to go through on this video interview with UKFast who provide my server and management service (http://ql2.me/1/ukvid/)
google webmaster tools now give you good advice about your site loading time and show you what things are causing the slowness, it’s really worth the time spent to go through it all and try and tweak as much as you can.
btw.. thanks for being a commentluv user
Andy Bailey´s last blog ..Godaddy coupons offer extended
The W3 Super Cache for WordPress sites works. And there are good suggestions on the FAQ page of the plug-in at WordPress.org, including using Content Delivery Networks available from Amazon Cloudfront and several others:
This is the link:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/faq/
{One day all CDNs will be ours of right, funded by insurance companies and visible in the sky.}
Sorry, Jim, but I think you’re off base here. I doubt very much cost has anything to do with load time speed. There are lots of variables involved including your own internet connection speed, how many graphics you have, if you use Flash and so forth.
The servers where your site is hosted is just one of those factors. I’ve used low-cost hosting for years and I’ve never had a problem with load time or up time.
Unless you have specific data about a given host, I don’t think you can make any direct correlation between price and load time.
Ron Miller´s last blog ..New AT&T Plans Make No Sense
Hi Ron. Thanks for the feedback.
I receive emails regularly from people asking me to check out their sites and often, these are so slow as to be painful to access. I often ask who they use – in 100% of cases, it’s a bargain basement provider – $5 a month etc.
As many others have stated here, with hosting, you get what you pay for. Your comment is the first I have seen, that says there’s no link between $5 a month hosts and poor / unreliable service. Surely you’re not saying a $5 a month host and someone like Rackspace are comparable?
Yes, as has already been said many times, of course there are LOTS of factors behind poor speed times. To ignore the impact of a slow, unreliable hosting is, in my opinion, a mistake.
@Ron Miller
You’re kidding right? You reckon cheap hosts are no different from good ones? C’mon
Even on a fast reliable host there are still areas that need improvement. We used the Page Speed plugin and really increased our site load time. So far it seems like Google is showing us more love.
I had hosted on GoDaddy for years and like Jim said I would like clockwork be down at least once a month on each of my sites. The load times as the sites grew were horrendous. It was when one of my sites crashed the week before Christmas that I got fed up and got a VPS from Liquid Web. Pricey? Yes! Worth It? ABSOLUTELY! I have in 9 months never had my site down, they load quick as heck and the support and service has been PHENOMENAL. They do not try to upsell me on every call and actually are able to answer technical questions and not pass me on to someone else – these area all things that I am more than willing to pay more for! Old adage you get what you pay for is very true for Hosting.
JIll C´s last undefined ..If you register your site for free at