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5 Hosting Mistakes That Cost Small Businesses Customers
Bad hosting is invisible — until it isn't. Most small business owners don't realise their hosting is hurting them until a customer mentions the site was slow, or worse, they never hear about it at all. Here's what to watch for.
01 Shared Hosting — Your Site Slows Down When Others Get Busy
Shared hosting puts your website on the same server as hundreds of other sites. When one of those sites gets a traffic spike — a sale, a press mention, a viral post — everyone on that server pays the price in speed.
Google uses page speed as a ranking signal. A site that loads in under 2 seconds can rank significantly higher than the same site loading in 4 seconds. More critically, 53% of mobile users abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
The fix
Move to dedicated or edge hosting where your site's resources aren't shared. ORION-PRO uses dedicated compute on AWS and Google Cloud. ORION-EDGE puts your site on Cloudflare's global edge network — 200+ data centres serving pages from the closest point to each visitor.
02 No Backups — Or Backups You've Never Tested
Most cheap hosting plans technically offer backups, but they're often weekly, stored on the same server, and never verified. A hacked site, a failed plugin update, or an accidental deletion can wipe out weeks of content with no path to recovery.
A client once came to us after a WordPress update broke their site and their host's only backup was 11 days old. They lost two weeks of product updates, blog content, and customer form submissions.
The fix
Daily automated backups stored offsite — not on the same server as your site. Both Orion plans include daily backups. We test restores on a schedule so you're never finding out backups don't work at the worst possible moment.
03 No Monitoring — Finding Out Your Site Is Down From a Customer
If nobody's watching your site, you won't know it's down until someone tells you. For most small businesses, that means a customer trying to book or contact you and being unable to — and not knowing why.
Sites go down for all kinds of reasons: server issues, expired SSL certificates causing browser security warnings, failed PHP updates crashing WordPress, traffic spikes overwhelming cheap shared plans. Without monitoring, every minute of downtime is invisible lost revenue.
The fix
24/7 uptime monitoring with immediate alerts. Orion detects outages within minutes and responds — you hear from us before you hear from a customer. SSL monitoring and automatic renewal is also included so security warnings never catch you off guard.
04 Outdated PHP or WordPress Core — Silent Security Vulnerabilities
WordPress powers over 40% of the web, which makes it a constant target. Most successful WordPress hacks don't exploit clever zero-days — they exploit known vulnerabilities in outdated software that nobody bothered to patch.
Outdated PHP versions are particularly dangerous. PHP 7.4 reached end-of-life in November 2022 — it receives no security patches. Sites still running it are operating on software with known, publicly documented exploits.
The fix
ORION-PRO handles PHP upgrades automatically, tested before deployment to avoid breaking your site. For sites moving to a modern stack (Astro, React, edge deployments), this risk disappears entirely — there's no PHP server to maintain.
05 Hosting Far From Your Audience — Paying for Latency
Physical distance between your server and your visitor adds measurable load time. A server in the US adds 150–250ms of round-trip latency for an Australian visitor — before a single byte of your page has been sent.
Many cheap hosting plans use US-based servers by default. Australian businesses serving Australian customers are handing a load-speed advantage to any competitor using local or edge hosting.
The fix
ORION-PRO uses AU-region compute on AWS and Google Cloud. ORION-EDGE goes further — Cloudflare's edge network serves your site from the data centre physically closest to each individual visitor, anywhere in the world. Sydney visitors get Sydney-speed responses.
All five of these problems are entirely avoidable — and fixing them is straightforward with the right hosting setup. If you want to know exactly which of these are affecting your site right now, start with a free audit.