Cheap Hosting: When It Works and When It Backfires

Hosting at €1.50 a month looks like a smart saving until you calculate what you actually got. To be fair upfront: cheap hosting is not automatically bad. But every cheap plan is cheap for a reason, and it is worth knowing which reason applies to yours.

Where the savings come from

Sites per server. This is the big one. A serious platform puts a few hundred sites on a server; extremely cheap offers put several thousand. The result: when one site gets a traffic spike, everyone else slows down.

Older technology. Regular SSD or even spinning disks instead of NVMe, an outdated PHP version, no server-level caching. All of it produces a TTFB of 800ms where 200ms should be.

Support. A 48-hour reply instead of one hour, or a knowledge base with no human behind it.

The hidden items that level the bill

• Renewal pricing: €18 the first year, €48 the second — the classic model.
• SSL certificate: €30-60 a year for something that should be free.
• Backups: charged per restore, exactly when you need it most.
• CDN: a paid add-on, or unavailable entirely.
• Migration: €30-50 to move your site in.

Add it up: €1.50 hosting with add-ons easily exceeds a €4.20 plan that includes everything.

When cheap hosting is perfectly fine

For a three-page business card site that generates no revenue, a personal blog with no ambitions, or a test project — a cheap plan is a rational choice. If the site does not earn and does not need to be fast, there is no point paying more.

When it backfires

The moment the site starts making money. A store that takes three seconds to load loses buyers; a business that never surfaces on Google loses calls; a site without backups loses years of work in a single day. That is when a €3 monthly difference becomes the cheapest investment in the entire business.

How to compare honestly

Ignore the headline figure and calculate the total second-year cost with everything you need: hosting + SSL + backups + CDN. Then check the speed (PageSpeed Insights, TTFB) and test support before buying. Our plans start at €4.20 with everything included and a 30-day money-back guarantee — so compare numbers, not promises.