If you’ve done any research on hosting plans you’ve seen the deals: unlimited domains, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, only $4.95 per month. And these are major firms, not fly-by-night unknown companies.

So how do they do it? Most of them are willing to give you unlimited everything as long as you don’t try to use it. We worked with a client last month who was moving three large business sites to a cheap hosting plan to save money. Before we got the second site moved over the host was already “throttling” her account due to load. Her $4/mo plan includes unlimited bandwidth, but when she exceeded their “standard bandwidth” they began “throttling” her sites. Throttling is where they temporarily make your site unavailable for a few seconds at a time to keep the load averages down.

If you are a casual blogger with a site about the health benefits of organic turnips, you probably never will experience throttling, and if you do, your readers will wait a few extra seconds when your site slows down. But if you are a business running ecommerce, having your site slowed down or taken off the air for a few seconds at a time is a much more serious issue.

Most firms who offer unlimited disk space still track the number of files or total disk space and will take your site off the air if you exceed their unwritten limited. We have worked with several clients who have paid us to remove extra files from their sites so their hosts would put them back on the air.

Most hosting firms don’t backup accounts that have exceeded their acceptable disk space limits.

Several cheap hosting firms run outdated versions of the operating system and database software making it impossible to run a current version of WordPress. This leaves you open to hacking.

What to do? First, realize you rarely can get unlimited everything for a cheap price. Quality hosting has limits and still costs more than $5/mo. Nobody really needs unlimited disk space, or bandwidth — at least for legal purposes. Be prepared to pay for better hosting and pay for what you need. You invest a lot of time and money in your website, don’t let it be ruined trying to save a few hundred dollars a year in hosting.

Originally developed for blogging sites, WordPress has matured into an incredibly powerful, popular and well supported business website content management system. Here are six reasons why your website should be based on WordPress:

1.  WordPress slashes professional development costs.
Three big costs on most websites are the content management software, graphic design and custom programming. WordPress software is free, and there are thousands of free or very cheap design templates available. Even if you want a custom look, it’s much easier to start with an existing theme and modify it, than to start from scratch. Thousands of add-on programs are available, practically eliminating custom programming. Total development time is much faster.

2.  WordPress is more secure than proprietary systems.
Open source means that WordPress publishes the “source code” of their software. On each release, everybody can see any security holes, and anybody can propose a fix if one is found. Since there are literally tens of thousands of programmers looking at each release, the holes are pretty small and tend to get fixed within hours of release. No proprietary system has that depth of security review on every single update.

3.  WordPress really is easy enough for your staff to maintain.
Every content management system says it’s easy to use, but since WordPress originally grew from a Blogging platform, it’s always been easy to edit.. It gets easier with each release. If your staff can use Facebook, they can update content on a WordPress site.

4.  WordPress offers more advanced features than any other platform.
No single vendor can offer every possible bell and whistle – from shopping carts to Twitter boxes. WordPress doesn’t try either. But they do allow outside developers to create, share or sell add-on plugins to do these functions. With contributing developers all over the world, WordPress has the largest library of plugins of any platform available. Most are free, but even the paid plugins are extremely inexpensive.

5.  WordPress sites are automatically optimized for search engines.
Many businesses focus too much on how the site looks, and don’t realize until after the launch that the site is not optimized for search engines. Then the expensive process of editing and redesigning the site starts, trying to get improved Google rankings. WordPress is already optimized for search engines. Everything you need for basic or intermediate optimization is built in. Advanced optimization can be implemented with free plugins.

6.  WordPress finally lets you own your entire site.
Most businesses don’t realize that when they use vendor-based content systems they usually don’t own the software or the design. All they own is the content, and sometimes not even that. They can’t move their site to another vendor. With WordPress you can own the software, design and content. If you want to change vendors, you can move to any other vendor who knows WordPress.

If you have dreaded updating your company website because it was too expensive or too hard, it’s time to take another look. New software tools like WordPress are making powerful, professional quality websites more affordable and easier to manage than ever before. Contact Main Street for more information.