Hosting Mistakes To Avoid: 19+ Experts Sharing Their Experiences Choosing A Host

#1 Sean Si – SEO Hacker

1. Avoid EIG acquired hostings

We used to work with hosts that have a high quality of service and response until EIG purchased them. The chat queue became twice to thrice as long. And some of the agents welcome me with another brand “Thank you for calling brand y” instead of “brand x.” Also, the upsells of “security” while my hosting getting coincidental malware and viruses are very suspicious.

2. Not using the contact platform

I favor hosting services with live chat support since I get to make decisions in a snap. It’s important that before making any decision, yourself ask the questions first. Not all content is easily found on their site or is answered by their site. Also, on a sales standpoint, you will be able to gauge how responsive they can get when it comes to being a customer already.

3. Don’t Overcommit

This is important, especially those that take 24/7 uptime. Most of the hosts will tell you 99% uptime with caveats that well. If you consider it, turns 99% to about 90%. Because yes your hosting might be up, but if your database isn’t functioning, well the site is still down. For instances like these prepare to leave. Especially those that fail to respond and rescue the situation immediately.

4. Appreciate Honesty

We all know business communication and how political it can get. As business owners as well, we can smell those statements if it’s just covering up because of the succession of events. Gauge their statements, I have one host that went down for three days and their CEO apologized and promised to do better, and another host that keeps going down every other day and a representative apologizes without substantial reasons. I have dropped from the 2nd one and is still in business with the first.

5. Backup Services

Whether it’s their own backup service or service you purchase to be able to recover your site when matters burn, this is a vital feature for all businesses. That few dollars is going to save you a lot of days of anxiety, stress, and chaos.

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#2 Michael Bely – Research As A Hobby

The mistake number one that people do when choosing a hosting is not doing proper research of real long-term users’ reviews. Although I totally understand why it happens. They trust famous bloggers who are influencers and opinion-makers. Those bloggers are simply affiliates of some well-known hosts which offer low hosting quality for the money. Nothing wrong of being an affiliate (the hosting marketing works this way).

But it’s crazy about promoting the hosts which are known to be stay-away from among the hosting experts, to your audience.

Mistake number two is going for the lowest price possible. It’s okay to cut the costs and avoid paying for what you are not going to use. But if you want a cheap hosting with all whistles and bells, the unlimited plan is one of the examples. Then you are doomed to suffer from the service and have higher risks of losing your data.

If you indeed want to pay as little as possible, choose a hosting or a hosting plan which includes limited server resources. And only the tools and support options you really need.

Mistake number three is underestimating how much the technical support costs. For example, if you need high-quality phone support, then be ready to pay for that. You must consider that a hosting company in a shared hosting industry pays at least $15/hour to the phone support employees on a basic tier.

Keep in mind that highly-knowledgeable technical support staff is paid several times more. Just don’t fool yourself and be aware that the support costs are included in your hosting price. And if you are looking for a lower price, then be mindful that hosting will have to cut the costs somewhere else (e.g., lower speed and uptime).

The mistake number four is looking for an affordable shared hosting plan when using a heavy software (a theme or/and lots of plugins). For example, most multipurpose themes that are so popular on the Envato market do require a high-end shared hosting plan or a VPS for adequate speed. With a typical shared host, you will want to cry while waiting for your website to load.

Mistake number five is to overlook the hosting renewal prices. Yes, it sounds silly. But a lot of people are surprised when they get a bill which says two or three times more compared to the initial price they paid when signing in with a host.

Some hosts are very tricky (another word for unethical) when trying to make you skip the information about the renewal prices. Some hosts advertise prominently just low prices for the first billing period (e.g., a year). So, make sure you know what the renewal price will be when you are signing in with a hosting service.

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#3 Allan Pollett – Allan Pollett

When getting hosting, it isn’t as straight forward as you might think. You should decide between shared and private, managed or non-managed, cpanel or .net, etc. For the uninitiated, it can be daunting. Often most people just look at the price and uptime. For most people running a WordPress site, you’ll want to have cpanel on a private server. WordPress works best in a cpanel environment, and it allows you to manage emails, backups, and database issues with relative ease.

Having a private server is vital because often on shared hosting if one site gets hacked, then all websites hosted there will get hacked. So you want to have as little potential risk as possible. Also, make sure your host takes regular backups. As well make sure you back up your site offline. If you feel all of this too much for you, then look into managed hosting. Check the reviews of whatever company you chose and hope for the best.

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#4 Jacob Cass – Just Creative

The worst mistake you can make when choosing a website host is not doing your research. Consider what is right for your needs. Is it speed? Reliability? Security? Price? Support? All of the above? Each company will have strengths, so do your due diligence. If you are a small business with little technological knowledge, an excellent support team could be beneficial, or if you just want to save some cash on a low trafficked site, a low-cost hosting plan with little support could be better suited to your needs. Read reviews online of each of the companies you are looking into and make a decision based on your findings.

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#5 Zac Johnson – Blogging.org

When it comes to starting a website or blog, there are plenty of mistakes content creators, and site owners are going to make. However, one of the most critical decisions and potential mistakes actually takes place before you even go live with your site. This is the actual site hosting sign up process.

Here are some pointers to make sure to get started in the right direction:

• Go with a reliable web hosting provider that has years of experience and thousands of customers
• Search online for ‘real’ reviews and make sure you get them from a wide range of places
• If you are going to make money with your site or run a business, don’t choose the cheapest plan to save a quick buck
• Try to find a hosting solution that specialized in WordPress and also offers a one-click install
• Pay upfront for 12, 24, or 36 months to save the most money
• Make sure your web host provides email, chat, phone, and 24/7 support

Follow all of these tips, and you will avoid some of the most common hosting mistakes when choosing a web host.

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#6 Ryan Biddulph – Blogging From Paradise

Never choose a hosting company based on price alone. We all love to save a buck but using cheap hosting leads to struggles and failure because you cannot scale with a blog that crashes or loads too slowly. Invest $10 or more monthly in hosting to find reliable hosting companies and packages. Other than that, never obsess over hosting research for days, weeks, or months. Pay up, play up, then give most attention and energy to helping people through your blog.

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#7 Janice Wald – Mostly Blogging

I was with my host for many years. I didn’t choose them. The tech helpers I used at the time chose them.

At first, I was so happy with the service; I became an affiliate for the company.

Almost immediately, the affiliate program ended.

This should have red-flagged me.

It seemed they were a small fish in a big pond.

When my new IT helper built a custom theme for me, I started having many blog troubles. I couldn’t respond to commenters, save, or upload photos. It tuned out it was the host’s fault.

They said I needed to pay them for a VPN. I did, but the problems got worse.

Only then did people in my network tell me they heard terrible things about the company.

It was a stressful time. I use SiteGround now after researching hosts, and I’m happy.

People should learn from my hosting mistakes. I never researched the host before accepting what the tech helpers at the time set up for me.

Connection: Website

#8 Marcus Miller – Bowler Hat

The one mistake we see time and time again with hosting is just going for some cheap hosting package. Sure, you can get hosting from around $50 for a year. But, as with everything, you get what you pay for, and this will often be slow and insecure. You have to spend a little more for something that is super high quality. But if you move into the $300 PA kind of range you are often getting a service that is in a different league from a performance perspective.

The critical factors that quality hosting should deliver are availability (uptime) and speed. You want your site to be secure, and you want the hosting to respond quickly. Slow sites convert fewer visitors and rank more poorly in Google. High-quality sites and hosting providers are well correlated with stable organic rankings. So, if you are spending money on any kind of marketing, that is often many orders of magnitude beyond what you would spend on even high-quality hosting, we have a false economy here as your slow site is turning fewer clicks into customers.

Another mistake we see is that people will tend to use just generic hosting services. Sure, any LAMP hosting environment can run WordPress but is it genuinely optimized for WordPress (or any other CMS). There are hosting providers that provide solutions optimized towards a given content management system (CMS).

In a recent experiment, we moved a WordPress site from standard hosting to our optimized platform and load time was halved, and scores on Google PageSpeed Insights went from 30% to 80%. No manual changes or optimizations – just an improved platform with optimizations cooked in.

The main takeaway here is – don’t scrimp on hosting. It will negatively impact your customer experience and results from all other marketing. As we move to ever more expensive advertising clicks that can easily be $10 a click in some industries for paid search, it is a false economy to lose sales due to a slow loading site.

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#9 Raelyn Tan – Raelyn Tan

A mistake I made would be choosing a host with lousy support.

I have had my fair share of purchasing hosting where the support was really slow and incompetent. Before I found my current host, I had a host with really bad support. I had to wait incredibly long to get the attention of a support agent – I even fell asleep once while waiting for someone to get to me. There is nothing worse than having your website go down and having to wait for hours just to get someone to fix the problem for you.

Competency is another issue; you want to find a host where the support agents know their stuff and can actually help you with their problems.

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#10 Lorraine Reguly – Wording Well

Going with the cheapest service is probably the biggest mistake people make when choosing a hosting service. Instead, look for the best quality of the service. This includes the response time of the support staff, the price, the amount of space you get on their servers, and the number of websites you are allowed to host. These are all factors that need careful consideration. Also, choose a host that has an affiliate program so that you can make money by recommending the company to your friends, fans, and followers!

Connection: Website

#11 Minuca Elena – Minuca Elena

When you are choosing your hosting service, you should avoid getting the cheapest one. That’s what I did in my first year of blogging. I wasn’t sure that I will have any success with my site or that I will even use it for that long. So I got something very cheap, in case I give up quickly then I won’t feel I lost a lot of money. But despite my lack of confidence, I am still working online even after three years. A cheap host will make your site load very slowly and could also be down sometimes. Their customer service may not be quick to help in case you have a problem. I now use Site Ground, which is a trustworthy company.

Connection: Website

#12 David Leonhardt – THGM Ghostwriters

When I started, I bought several domains over time – this is more years ago than I care to count – and each time, I set up with a different hosting service. One of those hosts was a mistake. Due to some black hat trickster, likely in some foreign country, one of my domains got linked to an email scam and blacklisted in some places. But I didn’t know this. All I knew was that one of my websites had vanished from the Internet. POOF! It was gone. The site was with one of the big web hosts of the day, and I tried to find out what the problem was. They didn’t answer emails. They didn’t pick up the phone. I was entirely in the dark.

But not for long.

Another of my websites was hosted with a small, privately-owned company: Phastnet.com. This was also my email provider at the time. I was contacted by Shawn, the owner, to tell me there was a problem. If memory serves me well, it was related most specifically to my email (which was also hosted with Phastnet). He went wherever one goes to find blacklistings, and he fixed the problem. My email was clean again.

I don’t recall if the big, faceless web host reposted my website or not. I do remember that I quickly transferred the domain to Phastnet, and over time, I consolidated all my sites there.

The moral of the story is that customer service is what makes the difference. All web hosts promise virtually 100% uptime. They all offer user-friendly back ends. They all offer SSL certificate now (at least, I assume they do). It’s not the technical specs that would sell me on a web hosting company; it’s the customer service.

Connection: Website

#13 Matthew Woodward – Matthew Woodward

There can be lots of issues that occur when setting up your site with a web hosting service. To avoid all these in one swoop, you should use a managed host which solves the majority of these problems.

Managed WordPress hosts like WPX Hosting and Kinsta, take care of security, do daily backups and offer a fantastic level of support should you come across any issues.

In other words… complete peace of mind.

Not only that but my WordPress hosting case study showed they are the fastest as well.

Another fail-safe is to set up monitors which send you alerts should your website have any problems, enabling you to act quickly and prevent any disruption to your site. I use Uptime Robot who send instant notifications via SMS or email.

Another quick tip would be to never go with free hosting. You’ll have little to no support, your site will probably be riddled with ads, making it slow and unreliable.

Just make sure there is a money-back period so you can ensure you have the right package and do your research on the type of hosting service you need.

Connection: Website

#14 Chris Dreyer – Rankings.IO

Site owners rarely think about their hosting service until something goes wrong. It’s usually when things aren’t working when people realize what they got (or didn’t get) with their hosting package.

Here are some things to look out for before you sign up with a hosting provider.

Make sure they have the software to run your site.

Depending on what CMS or technology your site is built with, your host will need to be running software on their servers that supports your site’s functionality. For example, to run the popular WordPress CMS, your host will have to run the latest version of PHP. If the host isn’t running that software, your site won’t work.

Database support

Many popular CMS’s like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal use databases to store information like site content. If the host does not have support for databases, you won’t be able to use a CMS.

Look for good customer support

This is one of those things that you might think is trivial until you need it. Look for a host that has 24/7 support for things like database errors, site crashes, and other technical issues. Hosts that have multiple support channels like chat, phone, and ticket-based systems are usually the best. It can be very aggravating to wait for support to open during regular business hours when your site is down over the weekend.

Do they have other services you might need?

If you have a site, then you’ll need a domain name, probably a security certificate, email, and other things that go along with it. Go with a host that can provide not only hosting but SSL certificates, domain name registration, email accounts, and other services that go hand-in-hand with website hosting. Not having a host like this means you’ll have to go to other businesses for these services and that can be a pain to manage across different providers.

Solid backup services

Pretty much every host is going to offer some kind of back up service should you have to restore your site. Look for a host that has backup services that are easily managed on your own and/or that allow you to make backups manually. This can be a huge time saver if you have to restore something quickly.

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#15 Adam Connell – Blogging Wizard

Over the years, I’ve hosted my sites with a lot of different hosts. And there are three things I wish I considered in the selection process when I was starting. These are:

1. Speed

If you want your website to be successful, it’s going to need to cope with traffic. In particular, it’s going to need to be able to deal with a lot of visitors on the site without buckling under the pressure. A lot of budgets shared hosting providers have improved in recent years, but they still tend to oversell their servers, which results in reduced page load times & lousy user experience.

An inclusive CDN is an excellent addition to any host, but there are platforms like Cloudflare and StackPath that can take care of that.

2. Support

When it comes to support, it’s critical that you can get problems resolved fast. For example, when I was with Media Temple, I spent 1 hour on live chat trying to convince support there was a problem. They then forwarded me to ticketed support who took 9-24 hours for each response. After nine days, my website was still broken. Now, I host most of my sites with WPX Hosting and get most issues resolved within 20 minutes. It’s a similar situation for some of the other sites that I host with Kinsta.

So, it’s not just the support response times; it’s their ability to acknowledge and solve problems fast. And not only push back to avoid having to provide the right level of support.

3. Security

Security is an optional extra for most web hosts, particularly when it comes for scanning of malware and removal of malware. There are third party companies like Malcare, which can be great options here, but it saves a lot of headaches when the host handles this too.

This is another reason why I prefer to stick with hosts like WPX Hosting and Kinsta. Sure, they’re more expensive, but they scan for malware and remove it for you – no need to subscribe to pay an extra service.

Connection: Website

#16 Basilis Kanonidis – Ninja Outreach

Nowadays, the most important thing on a hosting provider is to make sure that your web site is fast. For this reason, try to avoid any hosting providers that have a cheap value on their plans. Why? Because this means that you will be hosting your web site with a lot more other platforms and you will not be able to have enough control of what you will be doing. One more thing is to try to avoid hosting providers with heavy panels (example Cpanel ) as this is making web sites to be heavier than lighter.

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#17 Ikechi Awazie – Ikechi Awazie

1. Don’t Let Price be the Major Factor in your Decision

There is a lot of cheap hosting online, and there is the temptation to choose to host based on your budget. While this might look like a sound strategy, it might be a wrong decision in the long run. It is best to research on other factors like bandwidth, server memory, etc. before you decide to use the hosting service. If you want to use a cheap hosting service, be aware of its limitations and be ready to take measures when issues occur

2. Take Reviews with a Grain of Salt

With so much hosting service, one of the great ways to choose an excellent hosting service is through reviews from other users. However, you need to take such reviews with a grain of salt. Never base your decisions on the evaluation of others without doing your own due diligence. There are so many people giving reviews for personal gains, so you need to be able to sift the gold from dirt.

3. Don’t Take Customer Support so Lightly

Never choose a hosting service that has a terrible support service. If you do, it is going to make your business suffer greatly. No matter how great a hosting service seems to be if,, their customer service is almost zero. Please look for the other way.

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#18 Jason Acidre – Kaiserthesage & Grit PH

One of the biggest hosting mistakes I made when I was just starting out – I chose to host my site from where I bought my domain (since they’re pretty much the biggest brand in this particular space).

When I started experiencing problems with their shared hosting plans (one of my sites got hacked a couple of times, as well as other mishaps from tinkering around the site’s backend), that’s just then that I realized they had limited chat support for technical issues. I had to go over Twitter to get their support team to help me. Definitely, a terrible experience!

My advice is to choose a hosting provider that really excels and go the extra mile in supporting their users.

Connection: Website

#19 Nathan Gotch – Gotch SEO

The biggest mistake is picking a web host based on price. You get what you pay for, and it’s a colossal pain migrating to a new host. That’s why you need to be deliberate and weigh your hosting options carefully. There are many hosting services to choose from. But how you decide will depend on the nature of your company.

If you’re just starting a blog, then it may make sense to choose a cheaper host like Hostgator. But if you’re building out a large website and have long-term plans, then invest in a quality host like WPEngine or Siteground.

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