The Arithmetic of Twelve Dollar Hosting

Hosting · Part 4 of 4

I want to do this sum from the other side of the counter, because once you have done it once, nothing about cheap hosting is surprising ever again.

None of what follows requires anybody to be a villain. It is simply what a hundred and forty four dollars a year can pay for.

What twelve dollars a month has to cover

Out of that hundred and forty four dollars, before anyone earns a cent, comes the slice of the machine, the power and the cooling to run it, the bandwidth, the control panel licence, the card processing fee, the cost of advertising to get you in the first place, and any support you use.

Look down that list and find the expensive item. It is not the hardware. Hardware has been getting cheaper every year since I started doing this in 1996. The expensive item is a person.

Which means the model only works if you never call

One real support conversation, the kind where somebody reads your ticket, opens your site, works out what is wrong and fixes it, costs more than your account earns in a year. Possibly in several years.

That is not an accusation. It is arithmetic, and it explains every experience you have ever had with budget hosting support.

The knowledge base article instead of an answer. The ticket queue. The chatbot. The four hour wait. The reply that clearly did not read your question and asks you to clear your cache. None of that is incompetence. It is a system doing exactly what the price requires it to do, which is to deflect you politely enough that you do not leave.

So the same three things always get thinned

Isolation, because boundaries cost capacity

Giving every account a genuinely separate space means fitting fewer accounts on each machine, and the whole model is accounts per machine. So the boundaries are thin. That is the shared fate problem from part one, and now you can see why it is structural rather than careless.

Backup retention, because storage bills arrive monthly

Storage costs money every month for something that almost no customer ever uses. So retention is short, or the copy lives on the same machine as the site, or both. It is the rational choice for the host and the wrong one for you. The ACSC guidance on regular backups says the opposite: keep a copy on a device that is disconnected from the network and stored somewhere secure.

People, because people cost the most

This is the one that hurts on the day it matters, and it is the one nobody thinks about while comparing prices, because on a good day it is invisible.

Those three are not random cuts. They are precisely the three things that decide whether a bad Tuesday is a phone call or a fortnight.

The overselling is statistics, not fraud

Every budget account is sold resources it will almost never fully use, on the safe assumption that not everyone needs them at once. Airlines do it, gyms do it, insurers do it. It works, right up until the assumption fails.

On a shared server the assumption fails when a neighbour has an unexpectedly good week, or when a neighbour gets compromised and their slice starts doing something expensive. You did nothing. Your site slows down or stops anyway.

What the honest version costs

I am not going to pretend there is no sales pitch here, so let me put our number on the table. Our managed hosting is $600 a year inc GST, or $60 a month inc GST. Roughly four times a budget plan.

What the difference buys is not faster hardware. It buys capacity that is not oversold, backups that leave the machine, finish on a disk that is not plugged into anything, and are kept for at least a year, which is what makes them useful when a problem turns out to be months old, and a phone number that reaches someone who knows how your site is built.

Put another way: for the price difference you are buying the third thing on that thinned list back. You are buying a person.

For comparison, a single malware cleanup starts at $700 inc GST, worked in two-hour blocks. One incident costs more than the annual difference, and that is before you count the days offline.

How to decide without taking my word for it

Do not compare prices. Prices are the easy number and they are the wrong number.

Compare the worst day instead. Write down one sentence: my website is broken and I do not know why. Then ask your current host, and anyone you are considering, four things.

• What happens next, and how quickly?
• Who does it, and will they know anything about my site?
• What does it cost me?
• What is the longest it could reasonably take?

When you have those answers side by side, the price difference becomes a much smaller number than it looked. That is the whole argument of this series in one exercise.

The series in four lines

• Part one: cheap plans leave out tested backups and a space of your own.
• Part two: distance is a physical cost you pay on every uncached page, and every time you edit your own site.
• Part three: where your data lives is a question with four possible answers, and the obligation stays with you.
• Part four: all of it is predictable from the price. Nobody has to be a villain.

Common questions