Greater Maintenance Costs, Lost Customers and More Headaches Run Up the Tab
When discussing all that’s wrong in the WordPress managed hosting and maintenance space, Khali Henderson, a technology marketing expert behind many of the largest trade shows, associations and media properties in the technology services space, summed the problem of an entire industry in less than 10 words: “Race-to-zero pricing never works out for customers.” In other words, cheap WordPress hosting is expensive.
Why Henderson’s Team Set Out to Tame Clients’ WordPress Maintenance Costs
Henderson’s firm BuzzTheory, a video marketing, content marketing and digital services agency, was solving for an increasingly prevalent problem facing the firm’s clients— degradation in managed WordPress hosting services. This degradation was causing:
- Unreliable site speed
- Frequent outages in supposed “outage proof” configurations, many of which were being dishonestly underreported in web host “status” and “outage” trackers
- Sloppy maintenance resulting in staging environments out of sync with live environments, including staging environments getting ahead of live environments
- Cache clearing requests going into queues with no clear release time, interrupting time-sensitive public relations and marketing campaigns
- Sales quotas for host help desks driving recommendations for fee-based fixes instead of honest assessments and resolution
- Corrupted “backups” in rollbacks from big hosts (which Henderson’s team suspected was tied to the caching issues)
- Delays in fixes the hosts did acknowledge were theirs, with “pay-to-escalate” fees in order to get host-side problems fixed sooner
- Maintenance issues of all kinds – particularly when theme and plugin updates became entangled in caching and staging environment problems
How Managed WordPress Hosting Price Wars Cost You
The issues had reached a fever pitch for Henderson’s clients. She gathered her tech team and strategists together to discuss the problem. It didn’t take long for a picture to emerge. Hosting companies, facing one of the most expensive customer acquisition costs in technology services, had become locked in price wars. As a result, they’re employing in tactics that are wreaking havoc on customers like you, such as:
- Lower-cost first-year hosting with big renewal price hikes (banking on you not wanting the headaches of porting your sites)
- Add-on costs and upsells for everything – even when you just call for help
- Oversold servers that cause dramatic swings in site performance
- Hours lost managing your “managed” solutions
Cheap WordPress Hosting Costs Dozens of Times the Price Tag
Kinsta, which for disclaimer purposes is a RocketpowerWP hosting technology partner, released a detailed analysis of hosting costs. They found that, that by the time you factor in all costs, cheap hosting is 30X more expensive than you think. As a result:
- You’re being upsold on everything, even when the host is at fault
- Throttling is being used to reduce your performance on managed plans just as it does for basic shared plans
- Support staff are script-driven and sales (not service) oriented, and are either wrong, inefficient or know less about WordPress than you do
Cheap Hosting Costs You Thousands of Dollars
In reality, Kinsta is being generous to its competitors. That 30X cost they’ve identified is in hosting costs directly. This makes sense since that’s what Kinsta does, but those cheap hosts are costing you much, much more in other costs you incur as a result of their issues. These include:
Theme and plugin maintenance costs that skyrocket as a result of hosting problems
When you budget for a well-maintained WordPress site, you’re advised to plan for $1,500 to $3,000 in monthly tech support costs. That’s over-and-above the limited “maintenance” that comes with your hosting plan. This is because theme and plugin maintenance is extraordinarily laborious. It’s especially the case when tech teams are trying to keep your site running properly on shoddy hosting infrastructure. Sites need to be updated in a staging environment, so mission-critical resources don’t fail – which is why automated updates are so risky (and costly) to enable.And as seasoned WordPress site developers know, every nth time you update a plugin it’s going to crash your site.
That means digging through the plugins, previously implemented custom code, integrations and so on. Each plugin is supported by different developers running different update schedules that may be impacted by WordPress security and core updates. This litany of bugs that pop up regularly cost site owners and tech teams precious hours better spent elsewhere. On top of this, consider that all this work needs to be done in a staging environment provided by an underperforming host with inconsistent service and junior support teams that don’t know if it’s their environment causing the problem.
Risky delays in maintenance
In order to minimize the costs of maintaining your site properly, or to keep your tech team from going down the rabbit hole of updating themes and plugins, you may be letting your site components fall out of date. Dated themes and plugins pose significant security risks. How much is your cheap hosting plan costing you if you can’t even keep it updated and safe?
Lost sales
By now, you’ve likely read that you’ll lose 40 percent or more of potential customers to substandard loading times. That statistic comes from Akamai and was based on expectations of a 3-second loading time. Today, half of website visitors expect a 2-second loading time. (We didn’t say that hosting doesn’t matter. We said cheap hosting costs you more!)
Lost opportunities
When you or your IT team is focusing on website maintenance issues, other business development or IT development projects are put on hold.
STOP AND THINK ABOUT THIS. We’ve been conditioned to chase cheap hosting prices. In reality hosting makes up a tiny fraction of your website operating costs. Your costs of WordPress theme and plugin maintenance matter far more to your budgets, your uptime, your user’s experience and your bottom line. And cheap hosting drives those costs, which already dwarf hosting costs, significantly higher.
Focus on WordPress Maintenance – This is Where Your Costs Are Centered
All of these realities led BuzzTheory’s Henderson and her team to a sing.e conclusion. In order to solve the problems their clients were experiencing, the approach to hosting and maintenance needed to be inverted. Instead of looking for cheap hosting and then weathering the much higher direct and indirect costs of maintenance, the approach should be to build a solution around affordable maintenance and identify a hosting solution reliable enough to support that solution.
The results of that effort led to the following “wish list” for three core elements needed to deliver a hosting solution that could tame WordPress maintenance costs:
Get WordPress websites out of shared environments entirely
From a macro perspective, the degradation in managed WordPress hosting solutions was predictable given the history of other shared hosting models and the low barriers to entry in the hosting market. Business model challenges in the hosting space don’t have to become your company’s challenges. Get out of them entirely.
Go to the cloud, not traditional dedicated hosting
Almost all market-leading companies are moving their websites to the cloud. There are solid security and redundancy reasons for that. And if you can get on a Tier-1 platform, the speed is better. And the further Google moves toward ranking sites by user performance, the more important speed becomes.
Source hosting that’s Tier-1 (Google) and per-instance (or website)
The emerging game among some managed hosts is to move their large environments toward the cloud and spin that as being cloud hosting. It’s an evolution of the practice of “cloud washing,” a well-known term in the software and technology services realms. “Cloud washing” refers to the practice of taking something that is not cloud, or partially cloud, and branding it like a full-blown cloud solution. The aim of cloud washing is to convince a customer that he or she is subscribing to a more advanced solution than they really are.
In reality, every company needs is a dedicated instance of its website in its own container in the cloud. This frees the site free from throttling and shared resource allocation. And it should be Tier-1, not “budget” tiers that operate more slowly. Speed matters in user experience and in SEO. It matters a lot.
Helpful Features Can Also Lower Total Costs
In addition, the BuzzTheory team identified other features that move the needle for site owners. Since plugin compatibility and updates are at the heart of maintenance needs, features that easily allow for pre-deployment testing and easy rollback are essential to achieving predictable costs. Accordingly, the following additional requirements were added to the wishlist:
- Guaranteed security
- Automatic backups
- Staging environment
- Manual backups on-demand
- Easy (preferably single-click) restoration
Optimizing for WordPress Maintenance Can Reduce Your Direct Website Costs by Up to 95 Percent
The lesson from these efforts is simple. Stop buying cheap hosting and struggling with maintenance. Instead, focus on improving maintenance and update costs by wrapping them in a reliable, stable hosting system. You’ll cut your costs substantially. BuzzTheory took this approach to create a fixed-rate maintenance and hosting package for clients. The solution dramatically cut their costs and reduced their headaches. And it freed the agency to focus on core growth activities like video and content marketing – instead of fixing websites.
Ultimately, that solution became RocketpowerWP. Today, that solution provides fixed-cost WordPress hosting and maintenance to many businesses and website owners—not just BuzzTheory customers.
By applying those same lessons, you can significantly reduce your costs of having a website – and a whole lot of headaches – while significantly improving uptime, SEO, user experience and more.
