By Bill Sholar
•
01 Mar, 2020
If you are being offered a cheap website with cheap hosting, it will almost certainly be using software the web developer can get for free, supplemented with "plug-ins" built by hobbyists, and installed on cheap rented hard disk space with little if any service included by the "landlord". You probably can't afford "free" Around a half dozen times a year, those "free" software programs require "emergency recalls" -- replacing vulnerable portions with revised code. You can't not do the updates. If not updated promptly, those sites built on "free" software get hacked. In May 2020, the IT security journal Security Week reported that over a million websites using a popular plug-in for one of those "free" website systems were being targeted, sayin g that the hackers "can install a backdoor or webshell to maintain access, gain full administrative access to WordPress, or even delete your site entirely”. This isn't new. Check out this BBC news account of the ~12 million sites using "free" software that were hacked a few years back, when the recall was not applied within 7 hours of being issued . Your hosting provider is not going to update the software for you, and your website developer won't do it for free, if you aren't paying for support for that "free" software. What does such support cost? Google makes it easy to find costs of applying the "recalls" for the most common "free" systems. Service plans averaged around $100 - $150 a month, on top of that "cheap" hosting . That's just for the updates, not site changes. Not included in those service plans : Once the new "free" software has been installed, it's not uncommon for the "plug-in" to no longer work, so some part of the website will be disabled until that hobbyist-developed component is updated, or a replacement found. Believe us -- if we thought those "cheap" options were the best solution, we'd still be doing it, not shelling out tens of thousands of dollars a year on the advanced commercial system we use. A view from Down Under A while back, SmartCompany , an Australian online magazine for small business owners, published an article on why you might choose a commercial hosted platform such as our Online Business Partner ® for your site, rather than having your web people download one of those "free" programs and host it on one of those super-cheap services. Here is a summary, used with permission of the author, ruthlessly edited for length and to "Americanize" it: