10 Biggest Mistakes When Choosing Your First Web Host

You want to attract clients, not chase them with scary 2 or 3 stars reviews. 

Choose poorly and convert zero leads while wasting months migrating later. But if you choose well, you convert leads to paying clients.

Here at Truehost, we’ve been helping business owners choose and migrate to our hosting for over 13 years. 

If you don’t know much about uptime, server loads, and reliable support, you could be setting up your site for failure right from the first month.

From a site that goes down multiple times, support that takes days to respond, to backups that don’t work properly. 

That’s enough mess already flowing from your plate. Let’s fix that before you lose it any further.

In this article we’ll help you: 

• Identify 10 most common hosting mistakes beginners make when picking a hosting company for their first website. 
• Recommend a web hosting company that’s beginner friendly and won’t disappoint.

These are the 10 common mistakes that come up every time.

1. Choosing Only Based on Price

Cheap is always attractive. I mean why pay more when you can save some coins, right? 

But if you really think about it, it’s not actually cheap.

Just like how cheaping out on that laptop wasted your time clearing space for new emails, cheap hosting can’t do it any better. You spend hours cursing support staff that snob your ticket for days. 

Meanwhile customers are bouncing off your site at the rate of 5 customers per minute. How is it not possible after this to conclude that:

• Poor performance loses customers. 
• Downtime loses revenue. 
• Bad support wastes hours worth thousands.

Before you click that P99/month buy now button:

• Compare total value, not just price
• Calculate downtime costs
• Factor support quality
• Consider performance impact on sales.

You would rather sign up for P299/month than risk your credibility and lose potential leads to sleepless nights of fighting with support teams. 

2) Ignoring Where Servers Are Located

Ever noticed how some sites painfully take almost 10 seconds just to load? 

That’s more than enough time to load your washing machine, right? 

Well, there is such a thing as server distance. It usually directly affects the loading speed of a website. 

For example, if a site is hosted in Texas, it loads slowly for local visitors. But if the same site is hosted on local servers it loads fast.

Most beginners don’t ask where servers sit because they don’t know the importance of nearby servers. They create their site only to realize how fast customers bounce.

Choose hosts with servers near your audience. If you have a local audience, then go for local servers. But if you have a global audience go for CDN coverage.

The best rule of thumb is to go for servers in which visitors connect in 5-20ms instead of 200-500ms for distant servers.

3) Not Checking Renewal Prices

Promotional pricing is always shiner than gold but renewals are painfully costly and heavy.

One look at the promotional prices and you are already typing your domain name. I mean, why not go for $10 for a whole year the first one year, right?

But wait until you check the renewal prices and start paying 2-3x more. Most beginners regret later on, but you don’t have to wait for it to get to that point.

( attach a screenshot of reddit for the renewal prices here)

I remember the first time I wanted to buy hosting for my personal blog. What immediately caught my eye and made me sign up was the $2.95/month and sign up. A year later I started renewing for $10.99/month. To make it worse, they tripled the monthly bill without warning me.

Don’t  be like me. Sign up for hosting after checking the renewal prices and quality support. Also calculate the  3-year total cost, not just the first year. Although there are some providers whose promotional price equals monthly renewals.

Talking of quality support….

4) Skipping Support Quality Tests

You don’t want to have your inbox full of complaints. But you want to have an inbox full of product requests. Trying to be a system admin is even worse when the support team goes silent on you.

You raise a 1000 tickets later and still no one is responding to you while customers slowly withdraw from your site.  

This is where quick and helpful support saves you tons of hours to focus on your clients.

I can’t forget how frustrating it was when I was trying to get through a support team. Customers’ orders were bombarding my website like crazy and getting through to support felt like an impossible mission.

Hosting my blog on the shared hosting plan made it even worse. My site was down after every three hours. That’s when I learned to test support before purchasing.

If you don’t want to be stranded when your site goes down:

• Make it your personal agenda to contact support before buying.
• Ask a pre-sales question.
• Measure response time and helpfulness.
• Go for support with under 15-minute average response.

5) Forgetting About Backups

What is your backup plan when a termination notice hits your inbox right now?

It’s scary to think that you can be terminated today, right?

Hundreds of questions are probably going through your mind. One of those questions is actually a backup plan. 

You have a backup plan for your job and insurance for your car. Also please have one for your site. Sites break, hacks happen,and  mistakes occur. Without  proper backups, you lose everything.

Don’t just blindly  assume hosting includes backups. Many budget hosts don’t provide them or they charge extra if they do.

Verify backup frequency, retention period, and restoration process. Most importantly, ensure backups are included, and are not optional. If you find hosts that  include daily backups on all plans, that will be even better.

6) Believing Unlimited Means Unlimited

Just take a minute to think about it. What is actually unlimited in this life? A bit extreme I know, but just think about it.

For me I have just made peace with the fact that nothing is actually unlimited. Everything has its limit.  Then how come it’s easy to fall for that punchline?

Unlimited bandwidth rarely means unlimited because most hosts have fair use policies.

Most first-timers still see unlimited and assume it’s truly unlimited only to get suspended during traffic spikes.

You need to read fair use policies first and  ask about actual limits. Also understand what happens during traffic spikes with the so-called unlimited hosts. 

You don’t want your hard-earned traffic to be suspended, check for bandwidth limits that are generous and clearly documented.

7) Not Testing Speed First

What is the first thing you were looking for when buying your wifi plan?

For me, it was definitely speed. I mean who wants buffering wifi in the middle of a movie stream? 

You don’t want to be left in a cliff hanger before the actual ending of the movie. If you are a remote worker you know a strong and steady wifi is what fetches you the bag. 

But if you are a website owner, your site’s loading speed is the key to fetching those sales. In short, loading speed affects everything: user experience, conversions, search rankings.

Don’t  skip your speed testing. If you create your website and accept whatever speed you  get, you are definitely signing up for one hell of a time with your customers. Instead of checking out, they will be bouncing off. 

If you are a total newbie, I will advise you  to pick a host that  offers money-back guarantees. Use them to launch a test site, measure actual speeds and if this isn’t something that matches your vibe, cancel it.

8) Ignoring Future Migration Needs

Switching hosts later is painful without migration help.

Most first-timers don’t consider future migration then get trapped with poor hosts because moving seems too hard.

Choose hosts  that offer free migration assistance. Even if you don’t need it now, you might later because who wants to beg the support team at 3. A. M  right?

Here at Truehost we provide free migration. We handle files, databases, DNS, and testing. Zero downtime.

9) Not Planning for Growth

Your site will grow. When this happens, your hosting should also  grow with you.

As a beginner it is easy to pick hosting that just suits you at that time. It’s because at first, you are only working with your budget. But the truth is you will have a hard time when you scale and want to migrate.

Therefore choose hosts with clear upgrade paths. So that you can easily add resources when scaling from either VPS or dedicated server.

These hosts usually offer seamless upgrades from shared to VPS to dedicated with the same panel and support.

10) Skipping the Money-Back Guarantee

I have this one rule that I have been consistent with when buying electronics. I check for the money guarantee first. 

If it’s not there, what is the point of buying that device? 

Where is my insurance if it breaks down or blows up after a week?

Refund policies work in the same way. They protect you from poor choices because it’s actually human nature to make irrational decisions. According to psychology, humans are hard wired to make irrational choices when purchasing products.

It’s not shocking to sign long contracts without refund protection. But what will be more shocking is losing money if the hosting disappoints or disappears. 

Why  not just save yourself from the stress by committing to hosts offering at least 30-day guarantees? If you are not satisfied, you get a full refund. That’s a win-win.

Talking of stress…

Start Right with Truehost Today

In 2026, we said we are making it simple and stress-free for our Filipino clients to go online.

All the way from Makati, Cebu, and even Davao, we are making it easy for you to avoid these loopholes. Here at Truehost we believe that a happy customer is a satisfied one.

With our Web hosting starter plan that goes for only P199, you can start enjoying a 30-day money guarantee, transparent pricing, local support, free migration, and clear policies. 

Michael is not regretting his decision, why would you?