Web hosting is an industry that is filled with a lot of misconceptions. There are many companies that make promises they could never hope to fulfill, while others go unnoticed because they don’t make wild claims. Before you select a web hosting company for your site, it is important to understand what is fact and what is fiction in this industry.
Unlimited Bandwidth/Diskspace – There is no such thing as a server without any limits. Although a hosting company may advertise that they have unlimited plans, this is simply not true. They are betting on the fact that the average site user will never need more than 500 megs of space or transfer. If you happen to go over this amount, you’ll quickly get an email requesting that you upgrade to a more expensive plan or they may just disable their site.
In all fairness to hosting companies, they have to do this to keep the server functioning at optimum levels for their other customers. In a shared hosting environment, when one site gets a lot of traffic, the server’s resources are naturally allocated to that site. That can result in decreased performance and even down time for the other sites that are located on that server.
If you run across a company that claims to offer unlimited space and transfer, take a few minutes to read through their hosting agreement or terms of service. You will most likely get an idea of their true limits in these documents. If you don’t see anything related to the actual amount of space you can use, you should be wary of that company.
Uptime Guarantees – This is an area that is also very misunderstood. While hosting companies can employ measures to keep their servers up and running, there are times when things go wrong. The power may go out at their data center, back-up generators can fail or even software errors can occur that crash the server. If you find a company offering a 100% uptime guarantee, keep in mind that this is inhumanely possible.
It is also important to point out that scheduled maintenance is rarely included in an uptime guarantee. If your hosting company makes a lot of updates, this means that you could see a lot more downtime than you ever expected. Another aspect to consider is that it is physically impossible to monitor your site 24 hours a day. There will be times that your site goes down without you ever knowing it. Unless a visitor has your email address to alert you or you pay for a special monitoring service, you may just never know.
This protects hosting companies that do offer a money back uptime guarantee. Basically, when confronted with this situation, it is best to ignore the uptime guarantee altogether. It is simply not a reliable way to gauge a host’s reliability. A host that doesn’t advertise a guarantee may have more stable servers than one that does, it is all pretty relative.
Tags: web hosting
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February 26th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
All good points to keep in mind when shopping for a web hosting company. I would also do an internet search on the company’s name and see wheat you can find out about them. A good reputation goes a long way in this business and on the web a hosting company will quickly loose theirs if they fail to meet the grade.
February 27th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I would find Uptime being the most important (95%+), reliablity goes a long way.
March 2nd, 2008 at 3:29 pm
I would also agree that uptime is perhaps the most important aspect of a web hosting package, but I also champion good customer service and value for money. Being able to contact a live rep if you’re having problems is priceless for me, so I always do research on various web hosting review sites and discussion forums before choosing.
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:22 am
I’ve been stupid enough once to go for very cheap hosting, and you know what? The webserver was down three days. After the first day, I called him up and he was out of town. It took him another two days to get it back up. I moved to another host as quickly as I could. That was bad experience. The time I was with Hostgator were superb. Never a problem. But mighty expensive for a reseller package. It is about striking the fine balance between better service, and lower costs.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Nice article and some good points as always.
For myself, well, I always run a check on any potential hosting company to check on customer feedback. I’m looking for good uptime, great customer service and a support system that works the way it should.
I also look at the packages and avoid any company that is overselling like the plague.
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:03 pm
I think we should always consider these things when looking for a good hosting site. I first thought of going for the cheapest hosting site but it’s a good thing I decided to look for a good hosting company that can offer better uptime, support, and security than the cheapest hosting site.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Well, the purpose of the uptime guarantee isn’t to promise that it will be up that much time and “that’s final”.. they usually have money-back or something. I’m with Routhost, and they had a small downtime issue that I didn’t even notice because it was in the middle of the night, and they gave all their customers a free month of hosting.
The “unlimited bandwidth” nonsense gets annoying, and makes you question how truthful they are in the rest of their advertising. Most people don’t need it anyway… like 99% of the people who get websites.. yet they still THINK they do.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Guys cheaper hosting is not always better. Look for servers where the customer support is exceptional, you want quick, easy customer service. Once you set up hosting it can be a real pain switching so better to just get the right one from the beginning.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:41 am
I think it would be very prudent to take time to consider the points you mentioned before signing up with a hosting company. Once you sign up it can be very difficult to get your money back even if they don’t provide the services they have been promising. There are a lot of dubious hosting companies out there. It is always wise do a research on the reputation of the hosting organisation itself before signing up.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:33 am
There are so many little hosting companies out there that will fill you full of all sorts of stories just to try to gain your business and then when issues start arising they want you to just sit idly and wait for them to do what they need to do (or sometimes they just do nothing) These little hosts usually have way more downtime than what you would get at any other host that offers LESS bandwidth. Thanks for posting this. Someone needed to!