Low monthly rates on inexpensive hosting appears to be a great deal. You can pay less than $5 a month to host your website. But it comes with other hidden expenses.

1. SSL. You must have an SSL if you are accepting credit card payments or donations on your website. This is included in better hosts, but a $79 / year cost with cheap hosting. Having an SSL can improve your Google ranking.

2. Speed. When you test your website speed, you may be disappointed with the results. If you call your support line, they will blame WordPress, plugins, the pandemic, etc. But if you move the exact website to better quality hosting, it is suddenly much faster.

3. Support. When you are not sure why your website is down or giving a 404 error or slow, it would be nice to call the 24 / 7 support line to get help. You can talk with a real person, yes. But is that real person giving you good advice. Increasingly, the answer is NO. Even my favorite website hosting support recently gave me an initial response of “downgrading” my website to make something work. Really? But at least with quality hosting you can bump your request up to the next level.

4. Hacked. Cheap hosting gets hacked more often. When they restore your website, it is not always all there.

5. Backups. Which brings us to backups. Do you want to pay extra to have your website backed up every day?

6. Regular maintenance. More things go wrong when updating cheap hosting website. A plugin update fails. The website is left in maintenance mode so is unusable. Odd caching makes the website home page look very strange. You can call the hosting support team or your developer. Either way you are paying with your time or your money.