Hosting is cheap. You can go online and find hosting for a few dollars a month. Of course, most clients are aware of this, so it’s natural that the question pops up: Why does your hosting cost so much more than [insert $5/month provider here]?
nine10 Hosting is More Than Hosting
Our hosting price is higher than the bottom-of-the-barrel hosting options on the web. What makes it different (and worth it) is the support that comes with it. When you host your nine10-built website with us, the hosting includes a high degree of support and service for the hosting and your website.
When you host with us…
- We manage all the details of launching & hosting your website for you
- We provide free phone & email technical support for the website editor software
- We provide a warranty for the website software, fixing bugs or issues resulting from our work
- We provide free domain registration & renewal for one domain, and manage everything for you
- We provide an hour of free touch-up training for you or your staff, once per quarter, at no extra charge
Something important to note is that we don’t allow customers or other companies to login to the server directly to muck around with things. We do this to provide a more stable, controlled environment where we know everything works together and runs smoothly.
Of course, we realize that since our customers can’t access the server directly, we are the ones who need to support them. And we do! We provide a high level of service for all of our hosting customers so they don’t have to worry about domains, DNS or servers… they can focus on their business and let us deal with the messy details.
Hosting Your Own Site
Of course, you can host your WordPress website yourself at any time (it’s yours, after all!) But to be fair, we should caution you that you’ll be stepping into a realm of technical details you may not want to deal with.
While you’ll save a bit of money in hosting fees, you’ll be on your own to figure out everything:
- Selecting the appropriate hosting plan
- Setting up an account & purchasing the service
- Uploading your site
- Setting up your database, importing the data
- Re-configuring it to work on the new server
- Change your domain & DNS settings to launch the new site
- Manage all of the details of the hosting, domain, DNS and email settings on an ongoing basis
It also means that in the future, if there’s a problem with the website or server, it’ll be your responsibility to deal with it. Technology breaks, heck, sometimes that’s what it does best. So you need to ask yourself, do you want to, or have time to, deal with that when it happens? What’s your time worth?
Of course, you can always hire this out (most companies do.) But if you do, it will still cost money. In some cases the cost of hiring somebody to do this for you is higher than the first year of hosting with us, where we just take care of everything for you.
Warranty & Tech Support
One of the biggest changes to consider if you host the website yourself is the end of your warranty and tech support. When we build a website for you, and then host it, we include warranty & tech support for as long as you’re hosting with us. This is included in the monthly hosting fee. This means if the website breaks (e.g. a bug or error), or the server goes down, we’ll do what we can to fix the problem at no extra charge.
When you decide to move your hosting elsewhere, the support & warranty ends. This is because we can’t control what’s being done with the site or the environment it is hosted in, and a lot of new variables come into play that we aren’t set up to support. You can still get support for the website, but there will be hourly charges for any support, repairs or training provided. This is not unique to us, you’ll likely have to pay for this anywhere you go. And those charges can add up over a year, often to far more than the cost of hosting with us.
It’s OK to Host Your Own Site If You Want To!
The point of this is not to scare you away from hosting your own site. We just want you to make an informed decision and fully understand what you’re getting. A lower price may seem attractive when you don’t know what’s attached to it.
Hopefully this article sheds some light on the differences between our hosting and cheap online hosting plans. If you do have questions about our hosting or website services though, just shoot us an email or use the form on this page to get in touch.
