Avoiding Cheap Hosting Traps
Undoubtedly, the internet has become the most reliable medium for the latest news as well as the place where you can set off for the search of the most various products and services.
Sure, you would like to keep up to date and to set up your internet business. And here cheap web hosting is at your service.
But the problem is that there are too many providers and types of services that you just don’t know where to look first. You will easily find an affordable hosting provider, if you look for the following clues before you will invest in one or another hosting plan.
Outrageous Promises
Cheap hosting provider that promises five star quality customer support or 99.9% uptime. Let’s consider this example. Surely, you would like to buy services of reliable provider that has good reputation in the industry. And it suggests itself that such a provider should have a multitude of clients that is the evidence of the provider’s popularity and reliability. Let’s suppose that this web hosting company has half a million clients.
If one fine day only 1% of clients aren’t satisfied with the service they receive and decide to send an e-mail, this hosting provider will need to deal with 5,000 customers. It is basically impossible at least to answer 5,000 e-mails in a day, particulary it is impossible to handle the problems of all 5,000 customers. So, good provider doesn’t feed you with unreal promises and handles all problems “as quickly and efficiently as possible”.
Hidden Prices
Some of hosting providers like to display the lowest priced hosting plan in big bold type. But if you don’t want to come upon this trap you should go into details and ask following questions:
- 1. Does this provider offer only annual payment plans?
- 2. Will this price remain the same if you pay for one, two or three years in advance?
- 3. Will you have to pay a higher price if you would like to pay on a monthly basis?
- 4. Will this provider refund your money in case you pay in advance and want to change the hosting company?
Contradictory Statements
Some cheap hosting providers promise to give you unlimited amount of web space and bandwidth. It sounds too great to be true. Let’s not forget that cheap hosting implies that you share the web space with hundreds of other sites. So, in this case the word “unlimited” is contradictory in itself. It should be observed that some cheap hosting companies are gambling that you won’t use all the web space and bandwidth provided according to your hosting plan. In this case they resell this plan to other customers and even can do it more than once.
Well, now can you imagine the catastrophe that can happen if your and other customer’s sites begin to “eat” more bandwidth and web space? Your visitors will see “404 page not found error” and this can last several days. You should remember that when you purchase a hosting plan, you purchase the path to your company’s front door which your customers will go along. So, you should pay attention that nothing could block this path.
Unadvertised Limitations
It is naturally that some cheap hosting companies don’t advertise the limitations of the offered plans. Usually providers restrict the number of e-mails you may have, the number of files you can upload to your site, the use of scripts and the templates they provide so that you can build your site. So, be very attentive while learning the terms of contract and remember that purchasing a web hosting plan is, first of all, a business between you and a hosting provider.
