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10 Tips On Choosing The 'Right' Web Hosting Company. 1. Unlimited Or Ridiculous Amounts of Bandwidth. 3. The Truth About A Hosting Company’s ‘Uptime Guarantee’. 5. Deceiving Price Advertising. 7. The Truth About Free Hosting. 8. Hosting Provider Registers Your Domain For You. 9. Check The Speed Of Your Hosts Network. 10. Why Web Hosting Directories Lie? 1. "Unlimited" Or Ridiculous Amounts Of Bandwidth. The average website uses less then 50 Mb of disk space and less then 1 Gb (1000 Mb) of bandwidth a month. So why are these hosting companies offering ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and disk space for cheap? Think about this, with the exception of SPACE itself (and perhaps LOVE), everything has a limit. Without being too literal, the word "unlimited" in the hosting industry really means that there is no set number that can define the limit, and the real limit is determined by other factors. Most providers use the "unlimited" feature to suck prospects in and make a quick buck knowing that only about 2% of websites will ever use a large enough bandwidth to cause problems on their servers. These unfortunate 2% are told that their websites are either "killing the server" or "using too much server resources". The customers who use the 50 gigs of bandwidth for their website, will simply have their hosting account terminated by the Host, citing either of the above reasons, although the real reason is because the customer is using the 50 gigs of bandwidth that was promised when they signed up. If a host ever claims to give "unlimited" or ridiculous amounts of disk space and bandwidth - BEWARE! Lets do some number crunching. If a host offers 50 Gb (50,000 Mb) of bandwidth and hosted 200 websites using this plan on their server and 2% of the server used the 50 gigs of bandwidth, that would equal to 200 gigs of bandwidth a month used on their server. If the hosting company did not terminate those accounts using 50 gigs, than those 4 websites would be using more resources then all 196 websites on their server combined. So think about it, would a hosting company terminate 4 accounts paying $9.95 a month in order to double the amount of websites they can hold on their server? You bet they would! We limit the number of websites we host on our shared hosting server and our pricing and packages don't force us to ‘jam’ sites onto a server in order to be profitable. Most hosts put 1000's of websites per server, making it all that much more important to terminate the accounts of the 2% that use what their plan comes with. This is one of those features that every respectable hosting company must have, after all, your website is (or should be) online 24 hours a day. Some hosts define their support as an answering service taking messages. Sometimes, customer calls are never returned. Other hosts use voice mail systems that say, "I am sorry, all lines are busy now, please try back later". Always test a hosting company's 'support'. Call their 'support' number and see if they answer the phone. You will be surprised how many actually answer. Emailing or submitting a ticket to their sales department is not a true test as most hosting companies will respond quickly to sales inquires. After all they don't make money by supporting you, they make money by selling you. At OSIS Hosting, we are committed to supporting all our clients‘ 24-7-365 and we do REALLY MEAN, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. 3. The Truth About A Hosting Company’s ‘Uptime Guarantee’. If a hosting company claims 100% uptime, they are lying 'through their teeth'. All servers need to be rebooted every now and then for security and software updates. If they never reboot that means their servers are insecure and vulnerable to hackers. Just because a company guarantees an uptime that doesn't always make it true. Your uptime all depends on what type of server your website is on, and how well the servers are managed from the time your website is hosted on that server. Osis Hosting guarantees our clients a 99.9% uptime, and you can hold us on that promise. We will refund you 100% of your hosting bill for that month if we should fail to meet our 99.9% uptime guarantee. Many hosting companies will give you a prorated refund based on the amount of downtime. So, say you pay $9.95 per month for hosting and your website goes 'down' for 24 hours, the host will refund you for one day of downtime, which ends up being about 33 cents. A guarantee is worthless! What is worth something is how they define the guarantee, and if they do in fact honor it. Some hosting companies encourage and heavily promote advance yearly payments for hosting services by offering you a discount. Some even offer such tempting discounts that it is hard not to give into their ploy. Think about it, why would a hosting company care if you pay monthly or yearly? After all, if you are happy with them, you are going to end up staying much longer then a year. There are two reasons why they would ask you to pay up to a year in advance for hosting services. (1) The hosting company is barely hanging on financially and needs all the money they can get to pay their bills for the month AND (2) They know that their service is less than acceptable (slow servers, frequent downtimes and terrible support) and without an yearly commitment the customers are sure to leave. Don’t let them fool you on their reasons as to why they’re able to give you a substantial discount on their yearly plans. One story that they tell you is that their credit card merchants charge them a fixed percentage per transaction, which means paying yearly will only cost them one transaction fee, whereas on a monthly plan they will incur 11 additional transaction fees. This is true, but merchant fees aren't that much and their discounted prices are usually much more than what they would be saving on transaction fees. NEVER PAY YEARLY. Pay only month to month. OSIS Hosting accepts yearly payments only because some customers will only pay yearly. Unlike most hosting companies, our yearly prices are not discounted. It doesn't matter to us whether you pay us monthly or yearly. What we strive for is to ensure that all our clients are very happy, hosting with us. 5. Deceiving Price Advertising. Some hosting companies will advertise a very low and attractive monthly price, only to lure you to their site. You will very quickly find out that in order to get in on that low price, you must prepay for either 3 months, 6 months or sometimes up to a year in advance. All our pricing is on a month to month basis and there are no hidden fees or charges to worry about. NEVER sign a term contract with a hosting company for hosting services. If you do, you've just signed 'your life away' hoping the service you expect is everything you were told. With the exception of custom high-end dedicated server solutions that are built specifically for a customer, term contracts in this industry are 'history' so don't be talked into signing one. We don't require you to sign any contracts. You can leave us whenever you want. Ahhh, the word "free", used so often and abused even more. Why would anyone give away free hosting? In most cases, your website is required to display their banner ads to help advertise the hosting provider and generate revenues. For many customers this trade off is quite fair. However, in some cases, signing up for free hosting is like selling your soul to the devil (ok, maybe not that bad) and here is why. Your personal information and your e-mail address is sold to many, sometimes hundreds of "opt in" spammers. You have essentially opted in to receive all their spam when you signed up for the free hosting. Did you read the hosting provider's 'Terms of Service'?. Most people don't and that's just the honest reality. At times, the service is so poor it actually costs businesses large amounts of money in lost revenues. The same can be said for very cheap hosting packages offered by many hosting companies. We don't offer free hosting,
we don't spam, we don't sell our client information nor do we insist
that
you
to
put up
with annoying banner ads on your website. WE DO HOWEVER OFFER... 8. Hosting Provider Registers Your Domain For You. This has got to be one of the biggest scams going. If a hosting provider registers YOUR domain name for you, make certain that their information only appears as the technical contact at most and NEVER as the registrant. If a hosting provider has control over your domain, you are theirs for life and are held hostage. To check the owner of a domain, go to WHOIS and type "domainname.com" or .net or .org etc and click the submit button. Whomever's name, address, email, and phone number shows up under 'Registrant' is the domain owner. When you purchase a domain name from us, you are the registrant and the domain belongs to you. You can manage all aspects of your domain including billing contact and DNS server information from our Domain Management System. If you aren't sure how to change the DNS just contact us. 9. Check The Speed Of Your Hosts Network. You should test the speed of a hosts network to your location by ...
Look for the average ping time. The lower the number the better and the greater the chance your website will load fast, if you should host with them. Any number around a 90 average would be good. Anything below a 80 average is EXCELLENT! and an number over a 100 can cause your website to load very slowly. 10. Why Web Hosting Directories Lie? Don't believe anything you read on the hosting directories. They don't care who they recommend as all reviews are paid listings. The highest bidder gets a good review or steals the premium spots. |
