How Much Does Web Hosting Cost?

Web Hosting will likely be one of the cheapest things your business ever pays for. You might spend more on coffee in a week than some hosting costs per month. But speed, an extremely important consideration in hosting, will likely be awful at that price point.

And the potential cost to your business could be thousands.

Every website owner has different challenges to solve. But one of the easiest to solve can be bad (which includes slow) hosting. It’s such a simple piece of the puzzle that you rarely hear about it. It’s because no web professional would ever put their client websites on a low-quality host, but a lot of small business owners go for the lowest possible cost without knowing the consequences.

Slow Web Hosting Kills

Website speed affects your site performance. A faster website means a better user experience, which translates to lower Bounce Rates, which contributes to better search position. It also usually translates to lower abandonment rates because viewers don’t leave out of frustration. Abandonment is the opposite of conversion; nobody will buy from you or fill out your form if they leave before your site loads up.

Get Under Two Seconds

Does your site load up in less than two seconds? If not, you have an issue. Go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights, type in your website’s URL, and watch the results (shown in the image above). Most websites score lower on Mobile and a little better on Desktop. Run two or three tests for an average. Is your score green, yellow or red?

If it’s red, you’ve got serious issues. If it’s yellow, your site needs some work. Slow web hosting could be at least partly to blame.

A CDN Might Help, but Better Hosting is… Better

Big Pig ran on what we thought was a pretty good web host. We also used something called a CDN, or Content Delivery Network, that helped our speed. A CDN stores copies of your website pages on regional servers across the country for faster response to search queries.

But we weren’t happy, especially with the speed of our editor. It took forever to make updates to the website and a CDN doesn’t help with that.

So we changed hosts. Our speed scores are now in the low 90s for desktop (see image above), high 70s for mobile. The cost is barely more than we were paying for the previous marginal hosting and CDN together.

If your speed is coming in less than 50 or 60, you need to make some changes. Call Big Pig, we can take a look at your website and results and give you an idea of what has to happen first.