Getting What You Paid For

In general. website hosting is a game of you get what you paid for. If you paid $2.99 for unlimited space and bandwidth, don't be surprised when you get no support or your website is offline for days at a time.

If you are trying to save money you might in the short term, but you will pay later for it in many different ways, lost sales, lost email, missed opportunities and a bad reputation when people can't access your website.

You can tell people all day long that your host was down, the server crashed or whatever, they still see your website being down as a reflection of your business. "If they can't even keep their website up, what can I expect from their service?".

If your website is the first point of contact between you and new customers, it needs to be right and it needs to function at 100% all of the time.

As a hosting company we will tell you that a little downtime is not the end of the world. But you only have a small window of opportunity to hook a customer when they click on one of your pages. If the website is not responding or is slow they just go someplace else.

If you are selling used cars, that could be a lost sale of $10,000.00 or more because you paid as little as possible for your website hosting. How does it feel now?

Of course paying more will never guarantee that you don't have the same problems, but paying less will insure those types of problems. Companies just cannot provide an upscale personal service for $9.99 a month and none that offer services in that price range will promise to replace the services that people pay thousands of dollars a month for.

Not every business needs personal network technicians, 24 hour staff and multi million dollar networks but all businesses would like it if they could. Of course the budgets are at issue and you can hardly compare a $10,000.00 a month budget with a $2.99 budget. Larger companies can afford and need much more than small companies yet the impact of a website on the customer is the same regardless of the size of the company.

Your website puts you on an even playing field with larger companies and consequently you need it to work better than theirs to compete in the same market.

Saving money on anything is a great idea in todays business market. However you have to be careful what you save money on and understand the impact on your business.

If you need a delivery vehicle and you buy a used truck on craigslist for $500 you save $20,000.00 over buying a new one. If you use that vehicle all day every day you will probably spend $20,000.00 a year in repairs to keep it going while the new vehicle would have cost just $5000.00 per year if financed.

Did you really save any money? How many accounts did you lose because deliveries could not be made or were late? How many hours did you pay a drive to wait for the vehicle to be repaired? What was the real cost?

As business owners we evaluate scenarios like this all day every day except when we get a website. We look for the cheapest plan that offers the most. We spend as little time as possible on it and then ignore it.

At pageBuzz.com we realized that businesses looking to save a few dollars a month on websites don't see the value in the website and don't care. We realized that we were competing with the cut throat hosting companies that offered plans at $2.99 a month for unlimited everything.

We run a full network of enterprise level servers, a multi million dollar back end and 7 day a week personal support for our customers. We have real time back ups, fail over servers, redundant dedicated bandwidth providers all managed by a simple to use sitebuilder platform and we do it for just $20 a month.

So our question was, are people willing to pay a little more for better service or do that just want to save as much money as possible and pay as little as possible. The answer seems to be, saving money is more important than having a good product.

It was very disappointing to realize that small businesses were so short sighted and we had no intention of down scaling our service to make it cheaper. So we try to educate people on the value of website performance and reliability.

Our focus has been on businesses that have been jilted in the past by cheap hosts or webmasters. Businesses that have lost their entire website because of a server crash and had to pay all over again to have it rebuilt, businesses that have customers calling them saying they can't access their website and so on.

We realized that most people will not pay for quality until that have paid the price of being too cheap. They don't install an alarm until they are robbed, the don't carry a spare tire until they are stuck with a flat, they don't eat right until they have serious health issues that force it.

It seems our society is one of wait until it is too late. It is sad, but true.

When it comes to website hosting, businesses are the same. They buy cheap until it ends up costing them more then they look for something like pageBuzz that offers more reliability.

Unfortunately for us, there are services that are buying $2.99 websites and selling them for $20, $50, $100 and even more. So it is not enough to just pay more for a good service. You need to understand what they offer, know the reliability of the company, the hardware, the backup systems, the network and what they really provide.

Try not to get caught up in fancy terms that you don't understand or taken in by services that look too good to be true. Talk to real people, ask real questions and see if you get intelligent answers.

I called one of the $2.99 hosting plan companies and asked if I could run a site the size of youtube.com on their service. They told me that would not be a problem at all. Just sign up and they can handle it.

Since I know that youtube runs thousands of servers and pays millions of dollars a month in bandwidth with annual cost of $750 million dollars, I was very pleased that now google would be able to save $750 million dollars and just sign up for a $2.99 hosting plan. I am sure google will be very pleased to hear that as well.

I don't know if the person thought I as an idiot or they were just completely stupid. Either way, they are just telling everyone that they can do anything to get them to sign up. It is a joke and you need to understand that anyone that says they offer unlimited is lying and has no morals. They will take your money and provide little or nothing in return.

It is a mine filed online and it is buyer beware, which make it very hard to find a quality hosting service.

But what you can take to the bank is that if it is ultra cheap, it most likely is a very cheap and unreliable service.

For us, we have to compete with these outlandish claims of amazing products for pennies, but for you, as a business owner you need to sort the good from the bad and make the best decision for your business.

Be careful, do your homework and make the best informed decision you can. DO NOT sign up for the first service you find until you make some comparisons.