So it starts like this, Jane is starting a business and does not have a lot of money, she meets her friend Shirley for coffee (who already has a website), Shirley suggests that Jane should take a cheap hosting company who has almost too good to be a true offer which may even include the domain name. Jane thinks it sounds great and signs up straight away!

The average price for hosting a website in Ireland is around €60. Jane just paid a whopping €25 for hosting and they gave her a domain name for free too, a total saving of approx €40. It seems like a bargain and Jane feels great, she runs off and gets her website built and the years pass on, Jane notices her competitor’s websites are listing above hers on Google and has no idea why but we do! 

Jane set up a website to target Ireland to sell T-Shirts, her server is located in Mexico, India, or one of the other many low-cost suppliers of hosting. Many problems occur, firstly her website loads very slowly and the reason for this is the customer in Ireland must wait for the website to be loaded from the server in Mexico, but worse again the internet connection (or bandwidth as we call it) between Ireland and the server in Mexico is congested, Jane’s customer gets annoyed waiting for her T-Shirt to load and promptly leaves to go elsewhere. 

But how does this affect your Google ranking? Well, Google can see your website loads slowly for people in Ireland and Google wants to show its searchers high-quality websites, for this reason, it pushes you down the rankings. 

Another problem with cheap hosting companies is they tend to get all the worst types of people hosting websites, people who send spam, have viruses on their websites and content that is not approved off all this means that your server IP has poor credibility and guess what? This affects your website too, Google see’s that you are associated with these poor quality websites and again pushes you down the search engine. 

Location, Location, Location If you are targeting customers in Ireland it is important that your server is based here, the reason for this is Google will automatically pick it up as an Irish website and will give it that little boost on the search engine, this is really important and also helps with geographical searches. 

Another important factor to consider with your hosting company is how often your webserver will be down, since it is impossible for you to monitor your website all the time you do not actually know how often and for how long every day your website is not available for, poor hosting companies often have power outages, denial of service attacks, bandwidth issues and security problems, all resulting in downtime for your website. Someone who does keep an eye on your website all the time is Google and if they see your website is going offline very often what do you think they do? You guessed it, they push your website down and down. 

Another problem with these servers is that they tend to use cheaper or out of date software which means your website is more likely to be affected by a hacker, if your website gets hacked it might be taken offline completely or a virus might be inserted into it which will affect every visitor to your website if your website gets a virus Google will have a very dim view of it. 

So hopefully this little guide will have warned you about the dangers of using cheap hosting, for the small amount extra you will probably be happier to support an Irish hosting company! We work with a really good company called Cloud Host Ireland who offer great server, fair prices, and good quality hosting, their servers are based in Dublin (in a storage company called Rackspace who are well renowned for having great servers). 

Cloud Host Ireland is not the cheapest hosting company in Ireland but we think the quality is everything when storing your website on the internet. I will leave you with one little taught, if you lost 1 customer per year because of poor hosting (and to be fair you will probably lose a lot more than that) how much money will it have cost you to go with the cheaper hosting company initially, it really is penny wise pound foolish. You can purchase hosting at www.cloudhostireland.com