What a cheap hosting server could actually cost you.

Hosting is one of those things no one wants to deal with. Understandably, clients don't like spending money month-to-month on something they can't see. It's hardly the glamourous face of what Moogaloo offers either, but for clients who don't want to deal with it, it provides a valuable service.

There comes that point then in each project where hosting is discussed. We let them know what we offer and what the alternatives are. If price is the only consideration, going for a cheap shared hosting option makes sense. If however you want your site to be successful and to retain users, cheap hosting simply does not cut it.

To illustrate this, a client site that was hosting on our server moved to another server that saw page load times go through the roof. Where previously, most user facing pages were loading in between 0.1s - 0.5s , now they were taking 2.2s - 3.9s to load, purely down to the quality of the server.

So what does this mean for users?

Comparing a 6 day period on the faster server to the same 6 day period a couple weeks later on the slower server, what Google Analytics showed was the following:

 

 

(Obviously this is just one website, but it's not the kind of test you'd want to carry out on a live client site on purpose)

When you think about what your online customers are worth to you, consider the impact of twice as many people leaving your site due to slow page load speeds and poor performance and ask if that's worth "saving" £15 a month.