Many new retailers fall into the same trap, where they consider their website to be an expense to make as small as possible, instead of an investment to build upon. The end product is a functional enough site during the opening period, followed by steady losses over the subsequent years.
This story is not about overpaying for things. It’s about knowing the real price of what you are saving on.
Speed isn’t a nice-to-have
The quality of your hosting service can actually be measured by how fast your website operates, and the loading time of your page directly determines how many customers actually make a purchase. This is because a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can reduce your conversion rates by up to 7% (Akamai). This means, for a store with even a moderate amount of traffic, you are losing money on a regular basis and you aren’t even aware of it.
The speed of your website is determined by the technologies used to build your site, as well as the hosting infrastructure that powers it. If your website is hosted in a cheap, shared environment, your site is fighting – often a losing battle – for CPU and memory resources with other poorly built and increasingly popular websites on the same server. If the site next to you starts getting hammered with traffic – something well outside your control – your site will crawl to a standstill right along with it.
That isn’t a grim prediction for your future business. That’s what happens every day when you buy hosting for $5/month. Your website hosting costs should be considered marketing dollars, and marketing needs to produce results. A cheap hosting plan saves you money now but loses you money over time.
The locked-in cost nobody talks about
Custom website builders sell themselves based on their ease of use and low initial investment. However, they fail to mention how costly and cumbersome they can become as your business grows. As you scale, the transaction cost will increase and you will pay more to your builder. Also, the ability to customize your website is quite limited. Finally, when you reach the point at which you need a more powerful solution, you will probably need to start from scratch.
Understanding the cost to build a website from scratch on a proper stack helps put that figure in context. When measured against the transaction fees, migration costs, and lost revenue that come from outgrowing a cheap platform, the ROI often flips within 18 months.
Security is infrastructure, not an add-on
Shared hosting impacts not only the website’s speed but also poses a security risk which is not the case with professionally managed and isolated environments. For instance, cross-site scripting attacks often target shared servers containing various vulnerable websites as they find it easy to infiltrate new unprotected websites on a shared server.
And, when you’re the new kid on the block without any resources allocated to security, you will likely attract their unwanted attention.
PCI compliance isn’t a choice if your site processes card data. Simply having an SSL is not enough. Your site needs to be built on an environment that self-certifies (or pays for third-party certification) against the latest standards. This goes for payment gateway processors like Stripe and PayPal as well. Your site needs to sit on infrastructure that maintains their high standards.
It’s easy to do all of this when you’re building on a solid foundation. Adding security as an afterthought to a low-cost setup means worrying that every additional dollar of payment processing or new plugin update is the one that opens this month’s door.
Infrastructure signals legitimacy
There is also an emotional argument and you should probably pay some attention to that, especially as a new retailer. First-time shoppers are incredibly unforgiving when it comes to unknown brands. If anything is not running smoothly – your page takes long to load, the checkout hiccups, they get a browser warning when opening the payment page – that’s it. They’re out. And they won’t be back.
Professional infrastructure is a silent trust signal. No one ever thinks, “Gee, this page sure loads fast, they must have excellent virtual server hosting.” Or “Wow, that checkout flowed seamlessly. I bet they’re on a dedicated server.” But they will think, “Hmm, don’t think I trust this site with my payment details.” That sucks.
Even though no one will ever correlate cause and effect, because they simply don’t know better, your hosting makes a difference to your brand and sales. A small brand or shop can look like a million bucks and a popular brand can lose a customer with every minor hiccup.
Build in resilience from the start
One of the most practical reasons for professional infrastructure that often goes unsaid: the freedom to fail. Staging environments allow you to test the impact of a plugin update, a redesign, or new functionality on a copy of your live site before it reaches a single customer. Data redundancy ensures that a server crashes but no data is lost.
These are not selling points for enterprise merchants. These are simply part of most well-architected hosting environments, and they are not included in most basic hosting packages. A merchant who has never had a live site die from an update is less likely to value this. A merchant who has had a site die does.
What “minimum viable” really costs
Thinking of starting small and iterating? What are you iterating on if there’s no response from users because your site keeps crashing? Remember that big refactor you postponed until “next quarter” because it’s hard to change tires while driving at 100 mph? That’s your platform. “Iterating” will cost you 2x-10x more in engineering time. A few smart decisions and marginal extra costs upfront mean you won’t compromise on quality, speed, security, or agility later on.
