All web hosts are essentially the same- right?

The short answer to the title question is no, absolutely not. The analogy would be a skoda and a ferrari. Both have 4 wheels and an engine, so same thing right? I’ll swap you my skoda for your ferrari any day.

We’ve been asked this question on more than one occasion recently by clients- so we thought we’d address it here. Our agency spends approximately $1500 per year on hosting in a virtual private server environment. We could of course purchase a reseller account for a fraction of this cost, but we choose not to for good reasons, the list follows:

• Efficient 24/7 tech support on demand is always available. When something goes wrong with your website, for whatever reason, you want to be able to fix it asap. In a quality hosting environment this is a given. Cut costs however and you may not get a hold of anyone at all, or you may get in touch with someone who lacks the technical ability to offer any practical assistance.
• Speed- Higher octane servers are hugely important for generating rapid server response time. Users of websites are generally low on patience. If your site loads slowly, especially on a phone, they they are likely to move on elsewhere. Google itself treats website load time as an important SEO ranking factor. These 2 factors combined should make you want to ensure high speed from your server environment. Get into certain types of ecommerce frameworks that require plenty of server resources, and they may not work at all in low quality server environments.
• Security- Cheap hosting packages generally bundle many websites from many different authors under one roof. As a developer you really have no way of knowing what sort of security protocols your neighbors have implemented, one weak website weakens the others. Security features overall like proper firewalls and anti intrusion software are far more sophisticated and robust on better web servers.
• Backups- Many cut rate web hosts don’t offer any site backups whatsoever. If your site gets hacked and taken offline you may never get it back. That hundred dollars you saved on hosting isn’t looking such a wise economy now is it? With a decent hosting package comes frequent and comprehensive backups- anything bad happens and the site can be readily restored from the last backup- no lasting harm done.
• Overall server code infrastructure. A stable code environment with later versions of PHP, Linux, Apache strongly benefits sites running smoothly and meeting expectations. Older inexpensive servers tend to be less compatible with newer technologies. Indeed these sorts of setup have an unpleasant habit of requiring website code upgrades on very short notice, which if not performed in a timely manner can aversely affect website performance or cause the site to cease functioning entirely.

Website hosting is a very minimal business expense- cutting corners to save a few bucks may become a big regret- by the time folks realize this, its generally too late.