Is Cheap Hosting Really Cheap?

Web site uptime is a very important aspect of improving companies' bottom line.

Internet usage increases and bandwidth is becoming an important issue because of the high load on the infrastructure. Having a fast loading website will be more and more imperative to be successful in the market. Financial gains and sustainability of the web services depend on web customer experience in the first place.

Hosting becomes a commodity

Many try to decrease hosting budgets. Scary Truth about Cheap Hosting and the Hidden Costs you Never Know Until its too Late says cheap hosting budget typically ranges from $2.75-$3.50. But how much the does "cheap" really cost? According to the post above the possibility of getting low customer satisfactions increases because of slow services.
Cheap hosting services result in:

• 
  
1. Increased Website Downtime
2. Poor Server Response
3. Very Attractive To Spammers
4. Susceptible To Search Engine Ban
5. Lack of Customer Support
6. Fly-By-Night Risk
7. Exposure To Infections (Viruses, Trojans etc.)
• 
  

Loosing customer loyalty

Deteriorated Web visitors' experience is highly negative on business bottom line. How many times is it possible to impact a customer and make the first positive impression? With the speed at which internet and businesses evolve, slow page load time and downtime is equivalent to:

• Lost sales
• Decrease web popularity and SERPs ranking
• Increase pay per click cost

How one would know to reduce the load time?

Proactive website monitoring from different geographic locations shows the record of web site load time and performance to start with before making efforts to correct the problem. It will measure end users experience and alert you in case of problems.

September 2008 ISP Ranking

Mon.itor.Us network provides statistics to analyze Hosting companies' performance from Europe and the USA, based on more than 130,000 web sites (http tests) and 20 million checks per month. Tables below represent the hosting companies with 99% uptime in September 2008. Response times are in the 3rd column. The data is derived from real time monitoring of the web sites hosted on their servers. Number of sites shown in the last column.

Click on images to enlarge.

Thus choosing a reliable and high performance hosting provider is cost saving. Cheap is not always economical.

Mon.itor.Us and ISP Uptime Ranking for March - July 2008

Thee months after the last ISP ranking report Mon.itor.Us, a leading free website monitoring service, publishes new uptime statistics based on over 65,000 http tests and over 160 million checks for http performed during reporting period.


Uptime Statistics

The results are presented in the tables show: ISPs provided higher uptime from the US than Europe. 20 ISPs from Europe provided 99% + uptime and only one reached 99.5%, while 10 ISPs provided 99.5% + uptime according to the test results from the US location.












































-----------------------------------------------
Mon.itor.Us performs over 18 million checks per day between http, ping, https, ftp, pop, smtp,
dns, tcp, udp, imap, sip tests. Chart below shows allocation of the tests performed during the reporting period.

Hosting Companies' Uptime according to Mon.itor.Us in February 2008

The previous month Mon.itor.Us reported figures on Best Hosting Providers in 2007. It was quite a unique approach to measure the hosting company SLA based on aggregated performance of all http checks per each provider.

In February 2008 the monitoring results are as follows:

There were only 5 companies providing 99.5% + uptime from Europe in February 2008. Those are Google, 1&1 Internet, Akamai International, CrystalTech Web Hosting and Rackspace.

The following providers', iPowerweb, LiquidWeb, Hosteurope GmbH, Akamai Technologies, uptime went down compared to the 2007 results. Since there are 2 monitoring locations in Europe, Mon.itor. the data weighs is higher than those of the USA.

ISPs with 99.5%+ uptime from USA in February 2008 as shown in the table below are Akamai International B.V., Google, AKAMAI TECHNOLOGIES, 1&1 Internet, Rackspace.com, CrystalTech Web Hosting, ADDD2NET COM INC DBA LUNARPAGES, Hosteurope GmbH, GoDaddy.com, Peer 1 Dedicated Hosting, FastServers, Liquid Web and Bluehost.
High uptime providers' number increased compared to 2007 report, but iPowerweb again does not apprear among the top.