This is the fifth year that we are on the market with Salon Booking System plugin and we can say that we’ve received, and answered, thousand of support requests from users like you.
Many of them are related to our plugin bugs, that we try to fix promptly. Others are mainly due to the lack of knowledge of the plugin correct settings.
A great part of them are related to conflicts generated by themes or other plugins that were affecting our plugin functionality.
We wrote an article on this kind of issue.
It’s not Salon Booking slow, 80 % of the times, your hosting is
There is another important slice of support requests where many of you are complaining about the slowness of our plugin.
In many cases this problem is solved optimizing the Salon Booking settings. Deleting unnecessary rules that were slowing down the whole system. We also wrote an article to help you on this sensitive issue.
In other cases this problem was due to a one specific cause named: a poor hosting plan.
Today we want to make some clarity about this crucial issue.
A very short answer:
Having your company website on a cheap hosting plan will never be a smart decision. This is much more true if your website hosts your salon on-line booking system where every day your customers interact to book and then purchase your services.
The long answer:
We do know that many of you are small local businesses, with a limited number of staff members and customers hence with no great budgets to be invested on your on-line presence.
On the other side many of you are web-masters that have opted for a cheap hosting solution just to comply with your customers limited budget requirement.
At the end of the day many of you have opted for a 3 euro/dollars per month hosting plans, believing to have made a smart and affordable choice.
Choosing a cheap hosting plan
The reality is that every day we face a number of support requests where the problem reported is always the same:
“your booking system is too slow” or “the booking system generates errors”.
On our side to show you that the fault is in the hosting not into the plugin we usually clone your website on our servers to show you the dramatic difference.
Let’s make a simple clear statement:
Hosting plans and hosting company are not all the same.
On the web you’ll find tons of articles that discuss in details about this issue. Here some of examples:
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Best WordPress Hosting (2019)
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How to Choose the Best WordPress Hosting in 2019 (Compared)
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Best WordPress hosting 2019
It’s time to make a second simple statement:
You’ll get what what you’ve paid for.
You cannot expect to have a performing website if you have saved your money to buy a cheap hosting plan.
At this point I could hear some of you saying:
“The website is performing well, not Salon Booking System..”
Our answer is:
Salon Booking System, is not a simply website tool or a WordPress widget. It’s an articulated appointment booking system that needs to perform a great numbers of calculations in order to verify your available slots. It’s not a page with text and pictures to be simply browsed.
It’s a live complex tool that performs actions every seconds and it requires a minimum number of resources available from your server.
I will not go in depth on this as I would be too technical for many of you. But you should simply have this example in mind:
could you really provide a professional haircut using a cheap pair of scissors?
Your on-line presence is the other side of your real business
The same attention you pay when you buy the equipment for your salon should be put on your website.
One of the error that many salon owners usually do ( and even their webmasters too ) is thinking at their websites as a secondary thing separated from their real business.
The truth is that today your website is so connected to your real local business that can be considered the same things.
The browsing experience of your customers on your website is so important as the experience they have once arrived at your venue.
If the booking process takes too much time due to the slowness of the website it will discourage your customers to use it in the future or to not come to your salon at all.
If your staff members takes too much time every time they need to manage the on-line agenda they will wast precious time of their daily work hours.
The result of this is that you are loosing great money just for an under-performing cheap hosting.
I don’t want to talk about how the slowness of a website can also negatively impact on your website search engine indexing, you can find a bunch of articles on this.
I just want you to be aware of the importance of choosing a good hosting company and an adequate hosting plan if you have decided you use the web as a tool to increase and improve your real daily business.
Investing the right amount of money for a good hosting plan is the key
I can also image at this point you are expecting from me a suggestion like this:
how much should I spend for a good hosting plan?
It’s easy to answer: expect to pay at least 10 euros per month. It’s OK to pay more but not to go less than this minimum fare.
In this article I will not suggest you any hosting company offers as I don’t want you to believe that this post is aimed by a personal convenience to promote this or that company for something in return.
I just want to help you to provide the best possible experience to your customers and to your salon staff members too as they can rely on a performing website, a reliable on-line booking system thanks to a competitive hosting service.
