Be Aware of Long-term Costs When Buying Cheap Web Hosting

If you’ve ever paid for web hosting before, chances are you’ve been there yourself: You stumble across a company who seem to offer a great deal at great value for money, then when it comes time to renew, that same company want to charge you a small fortune to keep your hosting package.

When that happens, we’re forced to either pay up, or start shopping around for a less expensive option, complete with all the hassle of transferring our site from one server to another.

That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the long-term costs when buying a cheap web hosting package. OK, so it’s not hard to understand why companies like to offer us such amazingly good introductory offers. There’s a lot of competition out there for web hosting, and that company with the amazing deal would much rather you signed up with them than any of their competitors. The ideal way to find the best deal is a comparison site which lists all the web hosting deals in one place. If you’re looking to compare cheap web hosting deals go here for more information. Remember that some of the cheapest companies are just as good as the more expensive options.

To do that, they’ll often promote their premium packages for just a few pounds (sometimes even less). Are we going to be tempted by unlimited space and bandwidth, not to mention all sorts of extra features, all for less than the cost of a cup of coffee each month? Of course we are.

We’ve found a great deal, and we’re going to snatch it from their hands. So we sign up, hand over our hard-earned money, and get to work on launching our websites.

Then, a year later, the email drops in our inbox.

“Hey, remember that great deal on affordable web hosting we gave you twelve months ago? Well, if you want to keep it, you’re going to have to pay us at least four times as much.” Ouch.

What to do about it

First things first: When you find what looks like amazingly cheap hosting, first take a look at how much you’ll be charged after the first year. Most companies aren’t exactly forthcoming about this, and tend to do their best to hide the real cost of web hosting from us.

In most cases though, somewhere at the bottom of the page, you’ll find a statement like “After the first term, you’ll be charged at our regular rate.” It’s usually written in the smallest font possible, but does provide a link to a pricing page where you can find out how much you’ll be charged if you stick with your company for the long-haul.

Of course, it’s going to cost you more money, but at least if you know in advance how much you’ll be paying after your awesome introductory deal runs out, you’ll avoid those nasty surprises when you come to renew.

Renegotiate

If it’s a little too late for that, and you’ve already been hit by hefty renewal charges, another option is to simply contact your hosting company and see if they can do any better.

Trust us, we’ve been there.

Not long ago, we were given a renewal notice from leading hosting provider, GoDaddy. They wanted £80 to renew a hosting package for a simple WordPress site. Rather than pay up or simply go elsewhere, we contact their sales team and talked to them about exactly what we were using this hosting account for.

By the time we were done, our helpful sales rep had managed to source us a much better deal, and gave us a new package for only £8 for a whole year. Result.

We can’t guarantee that this will happen every single time, but it’s certainly worth investigating in your pursuit to get the best value for money from your web hosting service.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *