5 Hosting Mistakes That Cost Small Businesses

Hosting isn’t sexy, but it matters

Nobody gets excited about web hosting. But bad hosting silently undermines everything else you do online — your SEO, your page speed, your security, and your uptime. Here are the five most common hosting mistakes we see small businesses make.

Mistake 1: Choosing the cheapest shared plan

Shared hosting for $5/month sounds great until you realise your website shares a server with 500 other sites. When one of those sites gets a traffic spike (or gets hacked), your site slows down or goes offline. You’re paying less, but you’re also getting less — and it shows in your load times and uptime.

Mistake 2: Never updating PHP or WordPress

Outdated PHP versions are slower and have known security vulnerabilities. We regularly see business websites running PHP versions that are years out of date. Updates aren’t just about new features — they’re about performance and security patches that keep your site safe.

Mistake 3: No automated backups

When something goes wrong (and eventually it will), a recent backup is the difference between a 10-minute fix and rebuilding your entire site. Daily automated backups should be non-negotiable. If your hosting provider doesn’t include them, you’re one bad update away from disaster.

Mistake 4: Ignoring SSL certificates

SSL (the padlock in the browser) isn’t optional anymore. Google flags non-SSL sites as “Not Secure,” which destroys trust and hurts rankings. Most modern hosting includes free SSL through Let’s Encrypt, but you’d be surprised how many sites still don’t have it properly configured.

Mistake 5: No monitoring

If your website goes down at 2am on a Saturday, how long until you find out? Without uptime monitoring, the answer might be “Monday morning when a customer tells you.” By then you’ve lost a weekend’s worth of potential enquiries.

What good hosting looks like

Good hosting includes dedicated resources (not shared), current PHP versions, daily automated backups, SSL certificates, uptime monitoring, security scanning, and a CDN for fast global load times. That’s exactly what our ORION-PRO hosting plan provides at $220/month.

The bigger picture

Hosting is the foundation everything else sits on. The best website design and SEO strategy in the world can’t overcome fundamentally slow, unreliable hosting. Get the foundation right first, then build on top of it.

Want to see how your current hosting is performing? Our free website audit includes a speed test that often reveals hosting-related issues.