Hosting is one of the easiest places to try to save a few dollars a month, and one of the worst. The saving is real and visible; the cost of that saving only shows up on the day everything goes wrong.
When your site is down, it isn't down at a convenient time. It's down when a customer is trying to book, or buy, or find your phone number, and it quietly sends them to a competitor whose site happened to load.
What you're actually paying for
Reliable hosting isn't about raw speed, it's about not being caught out:
- Uptime. The site is there when someone needs it, including at 9pm on a Saturday.
- Backups. If something breaks, yesterday's version is one restore away, not gone.
- Support that answers. When something's wrong, you want a human, not a ticket into the void.
Nobody notices good hosting. Everybody notices the hour the site was down.
The real math
A few dollars saved each month looks smart on a spreadsheet, right up until one busy afternoon of downtime wipes out a year of that saving in lost work. For anything your business actually depends on, reliability isn't the place to economize.
Worth saying that being up is not the same as being fine. A server I looked at this summer was up the entire time somebody else was mining crypto on it, and every page loaded perfectly for all 97 days of it. That one is written up here.
