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| Finding The Right Web Hosting Company |
If you don’t know anything about web hosting companies, you should read this before you sign up with one.
Because if you think about it, you are really giving your money and control of
your website over to a company whose facilities you will probably never see, and
whose employees you will never meet.
Your website and all of its data can be accessed by complete strangers
at any time, and there is nothing you can do about it. In fact, try an online search like, “I hate web hosting
companies,” and you’ll more than likely come up with some really disgruntled web
masters’ blogs that will discourage you from ever signing up with any company
at all.
It may seem impossible to find that one company that will do you no wrong, but it isn’t really.
Many
people are unhappy with their web hosting companies simply because they didn’t
sit down and figure out what they needed in the first place. And also what
realistic expectations they should have from any company that provides web hosting
services. There aren’t as many people
that truly get burned by web hosting companies as the bloggers out there would
like you to think.
The most common mistake that you can make is signing up for
a two or three year contract to get a cheaper rate.
When you sign up for a really low rate in
conjunction with a long term plan, you usually have to pay in advance. So unless you can prove extreme technical
negligence on the part of a low-cost web hosting company, you are out of luck
getting your money back just because you think you got a raw deal. They either won’t refund your money, or they
will continue to charge your card, even if you try to cancel the account. These contracts are iron clad.
Most of web hosting companies have a 30-day money-back
guarantee, but it works to their advantage and not to yours. Think about it. It may take you a couple of months to get
your site up and running, only to find out that your third party software isn’t
compatible (like the customer service rep said it would be) and your site
doesn’t function the way you want it to.
If the thirty days is over, you will find it written in your contract
that the cheap web hosting company you signed up with isn’t responsible.
The best case in any situation is to sign up for a year or less and pay a few extra bucks.
A year isn’t that long of a time, and if you hate the company that much,
it isn’t that much money to swallow.
Another piece of advice, though, is to spend the extra twenty dollars to
make sure that you have independent ownership of your own domain name. If you take the free domain name offered by
the hosting company and you decide to break your contract, you have to pay for
the rights to take the name as well as pay the rest of the contract.
It is important to find out who owns the servers.
Another mistake is to check out the brand of computers a
company uses for their servers without finding out if the hosting company owns
them or not. If a company leases space
from another data center, they have no control over its physical location, its
security, or its equipment. This means
that you could sign up with a company in New Jersey, only to find out they have
a data center in Dallas. When the center
in Dallas goes down, the customer sales reps will have little information about
when it will be up again. Ask a customer
sales rep before you sign a contract where the data center is. If the web hosting company itself owns the
data center, get as much information as you can, including the location, type
of building, and how old the computers are.
Look out for ‘over-stuffed’ packages from budget web hosting
companies.
A lot of the time, they will
give you all kinds of software that you don’t need to make up for a lack of
disk space and bandwidth. This includes
things like multiple free image galleries and site builders, unlimited
sub-domains, unlimited numbers of addresses, advertising credits, multiple ways
to blog, multiple kinds of shopping carts, and software that isn’t necessary
for anything. Ask yourself: if you are only getting a limited amount of
disk space or bandwidth, do you really need to be concerned about all of these
extras?
Last but not least, you have to be honest with the hosting company on your own part.
Are you trying
to load an enormously huge web site on to a cheaply-priced, shared web hosting
plan? Even if it says unlimited disk
space and bandwidth in the advertising, the hosting company will spell it out
in your contract. They will also say
that if you purposely abuse your hosting contract as a customer, they can drop
you without a refund
.
It may sound like all web hosting companies are trying to pull a scam, but they aren’t.
You just
have to ask a lot of questions before you sign a contract. And if you don’t
know what you are doing, be prepared to suffer a few setbacks in the process of
learning how to manage a website if you don’t ask a lot of questions first.
See also: writeyourselfrich.net
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