Have you ever woken up to your site being down unexpectantly due to a missed payment or forgetting to renew your hosting? I feel your pain. This happened to me a few months ago. I spent all night writing a blog post and scheduled it to go out the next day, but when I went to check the site, it was down. I contacted my host and they informed me that my hosting had expired. How did I miss the email reminder? I set up my hosting a year or two prior and used a totally different email address. Because I also hosted sites for others, their sites were down too. In order to get everything restored, I had to pay about $180.00 to cover premium hosting for the year. Unfortunately, I didn’t have it to pay. So what could I do? What were my options?
If this sounds familiar, here are my 3 top tips to help you get through this:
- Contact your hosting provider and ask them if you can pay for the month instead of the entire year. For example, normally my hosting would be 14.95 per month for 12 months which is about $180.00 for the year. Instead, Bluehost allowed me to pay for one month and do a month to month plan until I could afford to pay for 12 months or more in advance.
- You can always switch to less costly hosting solutions. There are many options for hosting, and sometimes you can catch a great promotion. I had a client who was paying about $15 per month for her hosting and helped her switch to Bluehost where her cost were only 3.95 per month for 12 months. That’s over $100.00 saved.
- Call your current host to reassess your chosen hosting package, and see if you can downgrade to another package that still fits your hosting needs. For example, you may have signed up for the premium package because you thought you needed 25 email address and the space to host 10 sites. At the moment you only have your one site and you only use 2 email addresses. If the basic package allows you to host up to 5 sites and 10 email addresses and is $3.00 or $4.00 less, then downgrade and save!
Have you been in this position before? How did you handle it? Comment below and let me know your thoughts.