Web Hosting Report

The Web Host­ing Mirage

Web host­ing com­pa­nies are offer­ing prac­ti­cally every­thing under the sun for almost noth­ing and it sure looks fan­tas­tic. The obvi­ous ques­tion is, “Why on earth would I pay more than a few dol­lars a month to host my web­site when there are so many com­pa­nies prac­ti­cally giv­ing it away?” The answer is easy, when you know how the sys­tem works.

How Some Com­pa­nies Wig­gle Out of Their Promise

There is always a “gotcha” with every com­pany that offers unlim­ited stor­age and band­width for almost noth­ing. Most com­pa­nies hide lim­i­ta­tions to your account in the fine print, or cre­ate depen­den­cies that result in your inabil­ity to use all the resources they adver­tise. Here are just three com­mon ways some web host­ing com­pa­nies get around their promise of unlim­ited every­thing for prac­ti­cally nothing:

1. If they offer an enor­mous amount of space, it’s likely that they will have a file num­ber limit that means even if you have space left, but you have sur­passed the num­ber of files they allow, they will shut down your account.
2. Or, they may say, “sure use all the space with as many files as you want, but if you get too much traf­fic, then we’ll shut down your account.”
3. Or, they may say, “sure, use all the traf­fic and space and files, but if you use too much of the proces­sor time on the server, we’ll shut down your account.” (This can hap­pen if you have a blog that sud­denly gets pop­u­lar, or host a forum for your clients, or have some type of database-driven appli­ca­tion on your site.)

Granted, some­times they will only sus­pend your account until you cor­rect the vio­la­tion of their terms of ser­vice, but by then the dam­age is done and in many cases, it’s so easy to vio­late the terms (espe­cially when your site becomes suc­cess­ful) that after a num­ber of vio­la­tions, they will ask you to pay them more money and upgrade, or per­ma­nently close your account.

What is Overselling?

When the host­ing is super cheap, your account is usu­ally placed on a com­puter with 100s of other accounts and the cheaper the cost to you, the more web­sites will most likely be on that same com­puter. In some cases there could be 300, 400, 500 or more web sites on that one server. If every site used all the resources offered, it would require much more space and server power than the server would ever have. Sell­ing more resources than you have is, strangely enough, called overselling.

The web host­ing com­pa­nies who do this are bank­ing on the sta­tis­ti­cal prob­a­bil­ity that the major­ity of web sites will never use 1/100^th of the resources promised. For the most part, this works since most sites are tiny and never get any traf­fic. How­ever, if you plan to be suc­cess­ful, then you are all but guar­an­tee­ing that you’ll be the excep­tion and will lose the prob­a­bil­ity gam­ble. And when your site actu­ally needs those promised resources and they aren’t avail­able, you’ll be wish­ing you’d paid a few extra dol­lars for bet­ter qual­ity hosting.

The truth is you don’t need all the extreme drive space, unlim­ited band­width and CPU power that you’re being sold, in most cases. All you need is a mod­er­ate amount of space with guar­an­teed access to the resources you are promised. Good qual­ity shared host­ing has a low num­ber of web­sites allowed on the server and every bit of space and proces­sor power sold is avail­able for each account.

Why Should I Care?

Let’s imag­ine for a moment that you’ve just sent out your newslet­ter with that great new ser­vice, or prod­uct that you just start­ing sell­ing on your fancy new web site. You finally got every­thing up and now peo­ple start click­ing the link in your email and com­ing to your site in droves. But unfor­tu­nately, you’ve crossed the line and blown it with the terms of ser­vice some­where along the line and your site has been sus­pended. Even worse, you won’t even know it until one of your clients hits your site and finds the dreaded “404 Not Found” error, or pos­si­bly the “503 Ser­vice Unavail­able” error, or the most dam­ag­ing ever “Account Sus­pended” mes­sage. What hap­pens next is pretty pre­dictable and, sadly, com­pletely avoidable.

What You Lose

1. You lose cred­i­bil­ity as a busi­ness in the minds of your vis­i­tors and clients.
2. You lose sales.
3. You lose email (remem­ber, your email is down if your site is down.)
4. You lose time wasted track­ing down the problem.
5. You lose refer­rals from folks who thought you were a rep­utable business.
6. You lose new cus­tomers who just found your site and only saw an error instead.
7. You lose sleep won­der­ing how you will make sure this will never hap­pen again.

Obvi­ously, every­thing hinges on hav­ing a rock-solid, reli­able website.

The Price Sud­denly Changed at Check­out Time!

The last thing to note about many of the incred­i­ble deals you’ll see is the fact that the final price they are adver­tis­ing fre­quently does not include all the bells and whis­tles they men­tioned in the ad. In fact, you will fre­quently have to pay for each bell and whis­tle as an addon “fea­ture” if you want to get the total pack­age as adver­tised and it will def­i­nitely be a dif­fer­ent price than the one they used to get your atten­tion in the first place. If you sense that’s what’s going on, move on. I guar­an­tee there’s a bet­ter deal elsewhere.

So How Do You Find the Good Companies?

I’ve run my own host­ing com­pany for seven years plus now and have learned first­hand how all this stuff works. I dis­cov­ered the many pit­falls that await the inno­cent busi­ness owner who sim­ply wants to put up a web­site. If you’re feel­ing that it must be impos­si­ble to find decent host­ing, fear not. There really are some great host­ing com­pa­nies out there.

Look for answers to these questions:

1. Do they empha­size ser­vice and sup­port? That’s a good sign. If you ever need help you’ll be glad you have some­one to call at any time of the day.
2. Do they have a mod­er­ately higher price than aver­age and offer fewer resources than the super cheap com­pa­nies? Also a good sign. This means they are prob­a­bly not over­selling and you will actu­ally be able to use the ser­vices you were promised. (Dou­ble check and ver­ify this! Just ask them if they over­sell; the good com­pa­nies are proud to say they do not.)
3. How is their sup­port? Have you tested it? They should offer 24/7 tele­phone sup­port as well as a trou­ble tick­et­ing sys­tem. They should respond to tick­ets within a few hours at most and within an hour on average.

If it’s insanely cheap with out­landish stor­age and unend­ing band­width, it’s almost always too good to be true.

Research!

First check Google and other search engines. Search for the name of the prospec­tive com­pany you plan to pur­chase host­ing from in con­junc­tion with neg­a­tive key­words like sucks, scam, ter­ri­ble, awful, prob­lems, etc. See where it leads you. Just because there are a lot of neg­a­tive reviews, it doesn’t mean a com­pany is bad though. Every­one has unhappy cus­tomers at one point or another, but it’s how you han­dle the sit­u­a­tion that mat­ters. I know that if I can depend on a timely response and solu­tion to my prob­lems, that’s more impor­tant than being ignored even when I have almost no prob­lems at all.

Then check forums where you can depend on the verac­ity of the peo­ple there. I am down to only one place that I always check first when review­ing a host­ing com­pany and I think you’ll find it very use­ful. Check out Web Host­ing Talk for reviews and guar­an­teed objec­tive opin­ions. This is my early warn­ing sys­tem for bad (and great ) host­ing and it’s really all you’ll ever need if you com­bine it with a decent Google search.

If You Need Basic Host­ing, I Rec­om­mend HostGator…

If you are not yet receiv­ing thou­sands of vis­i­tors per hour and don’t need the extreme per­for­mance of a ded­i­cated server, or if you are just get­ting started with your web site and need an inex­pen­sive, but good qual­ity host, you’ll be happy with Host­Ga­tor. Their Word­Press host­ing is light­ning fast and updates don’t require an addi­tional login.

Which Host­Ga­tor Plan To Choose

The best plan to get is almost always the Baby plan (rather than Hatch­ling) since it allows unlim­ited domains whereas the Hatch­ling restricts you to one domain only and the price dif­fer­ence is almost imperceptible.

I use the Baby and rec­om­mend every­one get that to allow for future growth options. That allows you to use one host­ing account to han­dle any and all future web sites, blogs, etc.

You can save a lit­tle bit when you sign up and use a coupon I’ve cre­ated just for my read­ers and clients.

Use the coupon: coupon994hosting to get $9.94 off your first month at Host­Ga­tor. (Best used when sign­ing up for month-to-month.)

Use the coupon coupon25hosting to get 25% off your entire order. (Best used when sign­ing up for 1 year or more for max­i­mum savings.)

If You Need Ded­i­cated Host­ing, I Recommend…

Rack­Space has one of the best net­works and rep­u­ta­tions in the indus­try. I’ve worked with them for quite some time and have espe­cially appre­ci­ated their proac­tive, fanat­i­cal sup­port. (I DO receive com­pen­sa­tion if you pur­chase from Rack­Space by click­ing one of my links here first. And I cer­tainly appre­ci­ate that since it helps me cover the costs of man­ag­ing this blog.)

Short Sum­mary…

1. Host­Ga­tor (for shared host­ing — 90% of us need this kind)

Use the coupon: coupon994hosting to get $9.94 off your first month at Host­Ga­tor
http://www.hostgator.com/promo/penny-offer.shtml

Use the coupon coupon25hosting to get 25% off your entire order.
http://www.hostgator.com/promo/special-offer.shtml

2. Rack­Space Cloud (for ded­i­cated hosting)

3. If you need domain name reg­is­tra­tion with no fear of domain hijack­ing, great sup­port, a fast, well designed inter­face, and easy trans­fers in AND out to other reg­is­trars, I now use and rec­om­mend only NameCheap.com

If you have any remain­ing ques­tions at all, please leave a com­ment below and I’ll be happy to answer.

All the best!

–Zack

Dis­claimer

One way I sup­port this site is by part­ner­ing with some of the com­pa­nies whose ser­vices I also use. If you click the links on my blog right before you sign up with a par­tic­u­lar pro­gram, they will pay me a small per­cent­age for send­ing you to them. Of course this has no effect on the price you pay and no effect on the words I may say about them. I only rec­om­mend prod­ucts or com­pa­nies that I use myself. And some­times you’ll see rec­om­men­da­tions dis­ap­pear if I ever dis­cover that the com­pany, or prod­uct has not lived up to expec­ta­tions. This is why it’s really impor­tant that you let me know if you’re ever less than thrilled with any­thing you might have pur­chased that I recommend.

Thanks!