Why Super Cheap Vps Is Not What You’re Looking For
Managing business is always associated with planning your financial assets, investing more in some aspects, and saving in others. While there are things, saving on which won’t affect your business too much, there are things that are worth investing as much as needed. One of them is web hosting.
Looking for a hosting solution, you might be tempted by extremely cheap VPS hosting offered by various providers. However, a surprisingly cheap solution can hide some unexpected pitfalls that may eventually negatively affect the success of your business as a whole.
If you want a really good basic cheap Linux VPS hosting, you must aim at something that starts at around $4 a month. If a provider offers something that is significantly cheaper, it can be a sign that something is wrong with them.
Let’s figure out, what’s wrong with super cheap VPS and why a reliable VPS plan is an essential capital investment.
How Cheap A VPS Can Be?
VPS is a hosting option with a rather flexible variety of plans, starting with a very small number of capacities and going up to very big numbers. This is made possible by the way a VPS is created – through partitioning of the resource of a single physical server. However, there are certain limits to how cheap a fully functional VPS can be and servers that are significantly below them in price can in fact be something not very trustworthy.
Say, a regular entry-level VPS by a reliable hosting provider will cost something around $4 offering about 2 CPU cores, 512 MB memory, and 10 GB storage space. Something that is significantly cheaper or offers much more capacities for the same price tag should be regarded with suspicion.
The price of a hosting plan is comprised of a variety of factors. They include the quality of the data centre infrastructure, the quality of the hosting hardware, the salaries of the hoster’s employees, and whether you get the capacities claimed.
Let’s see, what effect the right hosting offer can have and what can be missing from an extra-cheap offer.
What Is Influenced By Hosting?
- Performance. First of all, the quality of hosting determines the performance of your website hosted on it. If something is wrong with the VPS, the overall performance of the website will suffer, resulting in lags, slow loading speed, or downtimes. In the case of extra cheap VPS, the hardware can be what the hosters save money on. They can be offering VPS on outdated half-broken machines, that won’t correspond to the highest standards of performance. Also, they can oversell their capacities so there are more users on the server than intended. In this case, the server will be always working at capacity and the users will often suffer from reduced performance.
- Uptime. Uptime is another essential parameter of a website. When the site is up and can be visited by internet users and can thus be used for its intended purpose. When a user comes across a down website, it can be just ignored and the user will look for another one. This state of affairs is also taken into account by search engines, so websites with high downtime rates are ranked lower. An extremely cheap VPS can have a weak point in this aspect too, due to poor hardware, overselling, or bad internet infrastructure.
- Page load speed is the parameter responsible for how fast your pages load. Internet users like pages that load very fast, while they tend to leave pages with slow load speed. A speed that exceeds 3 seconds is considered insufficient, and for this reason, site owners have to keep an eye on it. Like the previous parameter, page load speed has a significant aspect on the satisfaction of your users and on the SEO rankings. Due to the previously discussed technical weaknesses, on extremely cheap plans it can be reduced.
- Data center infrastructure. A data center is a facility where a VPS is physically located. It’s however not a random space, but it’s specially equipped to provide the optimal levels of security, performance, and connection. Providers of super cheap VPS plans can offer plans at cheap and non-certified data centres that don’t give any guarantees as to these parameters.
- Support. Support is an essential part of the hoster’s service. With technical malfunctioning occurring from time to time, it’s important to restore the operation of your VPS as soon as possible. Here, a support professional support team can be indispensable. At the same time, providers of super cheap VPS can save their cost on the number of support employees as well as their competence.
- Hidden costs. Cheap hosting can be associated with hidden costs articulated in this or that way. For example, they can offer plans with poor bandwidth, which will run out very soon. Or they will have very strict terms of service, with lots of limitations that can be easily violated, causing the customer to pay unexpected and unfair fines. In some cases, hosters may also sell the customers’ data to third parties without the customer’s consent.
Conclusion
As with any good thing, hosting costs money and there is a reasonable price even for the most basic option. If the price is suspiciously low, this can be a sign that something is off with the hoster and they either offer generally poor service or do something in an unfair way. Hosting is the basis of a successful internet presence and it’s not the best thing to save your money on. Opting for a sufficient VPS plan from a reliable provider is the first step to establishing a prospering website, so choose it carefully.