The Lies Hosting Providers Are Feeding You
I’ve never been interested in a problem of choosing a website hosting. In fact, it was a great surprise to know how many hidden rocks are waiting for a poor web developer on this way. And if you think that you have bought the best hosting, take a good look around. Probably your hosting provider plays tricks on you or probably it’s time to write a long thankful letter tor it.
Website hosting companies will promise you the moon just to make you be their customers. There’s nothing they will say, but you should know some typical facts that host providers conceal. So now I’m going to tell you 5 favorite lies of hosting providers which can hardly hurt you, but which are useful to know.
1. Unlimited Hosting Forever
In this title there are 2 words which are false: ‘unlimited’ and ‘forever’. There are several ‘unlimited’ features that hosting companies like to play with: domain space, bandwidth, domain hosting, files transfer, email accounts, etc. All these tempting things are really unlimited until your site grows big enough to pay more. I mean if your resource exceed some definite GB space or your traffic becomes too weighty for servers you may get an offer that is impossible to reject: “please change your pricing plan” or something like that. But there is one big BUT… you’ll probably never exceed these limits, because you can never become new Google or Facebook. These web monsters use private hosting plans, because it they wouldn’t their customers’ activity can easily overload servers and bring you unexpected downtime minutes.
2. The Higher Price Is, The Better Hosting You Get
If you shopped in supermarkets at list once you probably know that price is a bad quality performance. For sure, cheap things can hardly be reliable enough, but costly ones can also be bad servants for you. So if you want to get the best hosting for your business and not to buy a pig in a poke you should choose the most important hosting features for you. Remember, you’ll be always welcome by hosting providers to pay for their services, but don’t be in a hurry to say goodbye to your money (I hope host companies will forgive me this impudence).
3. Feature-Rich Hosting
I’m not sure if this fact is worth being selected as a separate post item. It’s quite similar with the previous one. The more features you get when buying hosting, the higher its price is. But usually you don’t need all the features hosting companies try to impose on you. Disk space and bandwidth are the most valuable factors for common users, other services are not so necessary and you can pay for them in case of need.
Don’t know which hosting features you need? Choose the platform you’re going to create a website with and you’ll know how to choose a good host. There are some examples for you:
- WordPress 3.2 hosting requirements: PHP version 5.2.4 or greater, MySQL 5.0 or greater, the mod_rewrite Apache module;
- Drupal 7 hosting requirements: disk space 15 MB, web server Apache 1.3, Apache 2.x, Microsoft IIS, MySQL 5.0.15 +, PHP 5.2.5 +
- Opencart 1.5.1 hosting requirements: Apache or Windows IIS, PHP 5+ , MySQL;
- ZenCart 1.5.0 hosting requirements: PHP 5.2.14 + or PHP 5.3.5 +, Apache 2.x or newer, MySQL 5 +;
- MotoCMS hosting requirements: PHP 5.2 or 5.3, Zend Optimizer 3.3 (for PHP 5.2) or Zend Guard Loader (for PHP 5.3);
- Joomla hosting requirements (latest options): PHP 5+, MySQL 5+, Apache 2.2, IIS 7.5.
4. Bad Response Comments
Some people guess that if you’re under hundreds discussions you’re quite popular. And it doesn’t matter if all those gossips are good or bad. Many movie stars make money on scandalous and negative gossips about themselves. So why do you think website hosting companies can’t do the same? That’s why next time finding a negative review about some popular hosting provider think over if this review can be useful for you or it’s just another clever PR trick.
I would also recommend you to read reviews, but not just look them through. It can happen that the majority of bad comments are caused with a bad mood of their authors. In this case you’ll read long condemnatory phrases with a lot of emotions and no reason of a dissatisfaction. Such messages are very easy to recognize by numerous exclamation points and caps lock typefaces. It’s a pity, but when people are satisfied with services they got, they are not inclined to leave thank-you messages.
5. 24/7 Support
Your websites are indifferent to daytime and holidays, they don’t care if you’re able to solve their problems immediately or not. On-server troubles can happen anytime and you’d probably like to get a qualitative help as soon as possible. In this case hosting support services need to be available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. And of course this emergency is expected to be done perfectly well.
But even if you get a response within several minutes after you’ve send a help request there is no guaranty that your problem will be solved immediately. Moreover, you can get just an automatic response like “Our support team will try to solve your problem as soon as possible.”. But this message doesn’t let you know if your problem is really solving at the moment or your ticket will be waiting till the next Monday morning.
24/7 support is a standard phrase which can mean everything or nothing. If a hosting company has a bad 24/7 support you’ll more likely have big troubles with it. But if support team perfectly works 6 days a week or during working hours only it can be much better for you.