RightBiz Web Hosting Blog

There are literally thousands of hosting companies that are available for you to choose from, so how do you go about picking the one that’s right for you? Obviously you can look for hosting reviews by other people but these are often biased towards the company, but the best way is to email them and ask some specific questions.

Here are the 4 most important questions you should ask a hosting company before you purchase their services:

1. Do you take regular off-site backups?
This is important because even if a hosting company claims to make backups, often they just backup the files to the same hard drive – not very useful if the server suffers from a catastrophic hard drive failure which happens occasionally. By taking an off-site backup you know that your site will always be available if something should happen to the server you are on. Also find out how often the backups are because if they are just once a month you could still stand to lose 30 days worth of data.

2. Do you have an uptime guarantee SLA?
Many webhosts will offer a 99% uptime guarantee, but they don’t say what happens if they don’t meet that guarantee or how it is defined. You need to ask for a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which details how they define uptime and what they will do if they do not meet their guarantee. For example, it’s not uncommon for a web host to state that downtime caused by a datacenter problem does not fall under the guarantee because it’s outside their control. If the web hosting company can’t produce an uptime SLA, look for a different host!

3. How many hosting accounts do you allow per server?
A server with a good specification will cost a hosting company around $300 per month to lease from a datacenter. If they are offering hosting accounts for $5 then they need at least 60 customers on the server to break even. If each of those customers had a total of 10 websites that’s 600 sites on the server. You can see that the server can quickly become overcrowded and in web hosting terms is referred to as ‘oversold’. If a company refuses to tell you how many accounts it allows per server then look for a more open and honest hosting company.

4. What is your refund policy?
Many web hosting companies try to lock you in for 2 or more years by offering lower monthly rates if you prepay. You might be asked to pay $125 upfront for the best deal which gives you 3 years of hosting. However, what if the service deteriorates after 12 months? Are you able to get your money back from the 2 years that you have remaining?

There are many other important questions you should find answers to, such as what happens if you exceed your monthly quota limits, how many inodes you are allowed, how many CPU cycles you are allowed, how many mySQL connections you are allowed, are there any email sending limits – but these are more technical and beyond what most people need to know.

The web hosting business is as cut throat as they come. The margins are tight, the competition is high and hosting companies need to use every trick in the book to persuade customers to choose them. Here are some of the more popular lies told by hosting companies to get your business:

1. Unlimited Hosting
This is the favorite and biggest lie of all hosting companies. They offer you unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited add-on domains, unlimited everything. However the truth of the matter is that when you read the fine print (some of the more dodgy hosts don’t even have a fine print) you will find that ‘unlimited’ is subjected to fair use. So if you are taking up 50 GB of space for your websites you are likely to find that your account is shut down or you are asked to move to a Virtual Private Server. If you have a very popular site that takes a lot of server resources, you are likely to have the same situation. Remember: Unlimited hosting does not actually mean unlimited.

2. Hosting for just $3.50 per month
This is another favourite for all hosting companies. On their front page they will advertise very low rates, but what they don’t mention (or it’s buried deep in the Terms) until you go through the checkout process and get ready to pay is that you are not paying $3.50 each month, you are asked to pay $126 for 3 years of hosting which works out to $3.50. It’s very sneaky and catches a lot of people out. If you want to pay on a monthly basis the actual cost can be 3x higher. Keep this in mind when you are researching which host to choose – how many years are they asking you to pay for to get their advertised price.

3. 100% uptime guarantee
There is no such thing as 100% uptime because there are so many links in the chain to make your website available. Any company that offers a 100% uptime is lying to try and get your business. If they lease their servers from the datacenter, the datacenter could be hit by a powercut, the ISP could be hit with a routing problem, the DNS servers could go down. There are just too many things outside a web hosting company’s control that could go wrong for them to guarantee 100% uptime. The one exception is if the hosting company has your site hosted in multiple locations around the world and if one location goes down traffic is automatically rerouted, but this is generally only for the massive corporate sites.

4. Non Oversold Hosting
Many web hosts will claim that their servers are not oversold. Often this is a lie because when they lease a server it might come with a 500 GB hard drive and 5000 GB of bandwidth. If they offer unlimited hosting to 75 customers, they’ve already oversold their server. In most cases you probably won’t notice much difference, but there is always the chance that you are put on a server with another customer who uses a lot of computing resources which makes your website slow.

There are a number of other tricks that these companies have up their sleeves such as perpetual sales and limited time offers like free domains, but they are all gimmicks to get you to buy right away.

Web hosting companies operate in a very competitive industry where profit margins are low and money is only made when services are sold in volume. They have to employ all manner of sneaky ways to get you to part with your money and increase your lifetime value to them. Here are some of the ways they will try and get more money out of you, and how you should avoid it.

1. Offer you a free domain when you signup
Virtually every hosting company will offer you a free domain when you signup. While this may save you a few dollars in the short term, the company will bill you each year to renew the domain. The price they charge can be more than double the cost of the domain if you were to buy it from a dedicated domain registration company. On top of that they offer a whois privacy service which comes free from many domain registration sites. The final kick in the teeth is if you try and transfer the domain to your own control they ask you for a fee to do this.

2. Offer search engine submission services
This is something that is becoming more common, hosting companies will try and promote their ‘search engine submission’ service which guarantees submission to hundreds of search engines. The truth is that search engine submission hasn’t worked since the late 90′s and there is only one search engine that matters: Google. Web hosts charge $50 or more for this service which is almost certainly automated and definitely useless.

3. Green hosting plans
Jumping onboard the Green bandwagon, web hosts have started to offer environmentally friendly hosting alongside their regular hosting – you even get a small graphic you can display on your website to show everyone how green you are. The truth is that very often the server is located in the same datacenter and they are just buying electricity from renewable resources like solar and wind to help power the datacenter. Other companies are using carbon offsetting by promising to plant trees to absorb the carbon – thus making your hosting ‘green’. Nevermind about the environmental damage that has gone in to making the datacenter, creating the server hardware, the diesel generator backup and what happens to the server once it’s reached the end of its life.

4. Purposefully limiting computer resources
With so many hosting companies offering ‘unlimited’ hosting, they are using this as a lure to get customers who would otherwise have chosen a more expensive option like a VPS or reseller hosting. What these companies then do is limit the amount of computing power you are allowed to use which makes your website run slow. When you submit a ticket they will say your website requires a VPS or dedicated server. Another way they limit you is by Inodes, which basically means the number of files uploaded and downloaded from your websites. Once you hit this limit you’ll find an email asking you to upgrade to a more expensive server. Very sneaky – which is why you need to email the host and find out about these limits before signing up.

All of these sneaky tricks can be avoided if you are armed with the right information and ask the web host questions before you buy.

When you look at the hosting market today you might be forgiven for thinking that there are only 4 or 5 decent choices, but if you dig a little deeper you will find that there are dozens of high quality web hosts that have been providing hosting services for many years without problems. While they don’t have the advertising budget of the larger hosts to make themselves well known, they are still professionally run and have proven reliability. The best part is that they are often ultra cheap since they don’t need to pay for legions of support staff and lots of marketing.

Check out this list of little known, very cheap, but extremely reliable web hosts:

1. HawkHost – $3.29 per month with a one year pre-payment
HawkHost have been online since 2004 and have been serving web hosting customers for over 6 years. They are well known for having high reliability and excellent support. If you pre-pay for the year the price is just $3.29 or they have a month-to-month plan which is a bit more expensive.

2. HostQuack – $1.99 per month with a one year pre-payment
HostQuack claim to not be a ‘cheap’ hosting company which is ironic considering they are one of the cheapest hosting companies around. While their yearly price works out to just $1.99 you can also pay monthly which costs $2.99. HostQuack have been around since 2007 and not had any major problems in the last 3 years. They have 24/7 online support available for all customers to.

3. StableHost – $3.62 per month with a one year pre-payment
Incredibly StableHost are older than many of the more well known web hosting companies having started in 2002. While they are not that well known to most people, their fantastic support, little to no downtime and very reasonable prices has won them a loyal fan base.

4. MagmaHost – $1.00 per month
How on Earth MagmaHost are able to offer hosting plans for so cheap and maintain reliability I don’t know, but they have done successfully for the last 3 years now – they even manage to throw in live 24/7 support as well.

5. LayerOnline – $0.99 per month with a one year pre-payment
I know what you are thinking, for $0.99 a month you can’t expect miracles, but LayerOnline have been successfully serving hosting customers for two years now. While this probably isn’t enough time to build up a reliability history, the price is certainly low enough to give it a try, especially considering they haven’t had any issues since they started.

6. WebHost.uk.net – Approx $2.00 per month with a one year plan
Another hosting company that has been around since 2008 that provide low cost services and have been doing so successfully. Don’t let the domain name put you off though, they have servers in Europe and America and also offer Windows hosting for those that need it. They have a 24/7 phoneline along with an online support desk and live chat for customers that need it.

The Internet has changed our lifestyle, and even our lives, in so many ways. We use the Internet to communicate, entertain, shop, work and even to find love. Our vocabularies are now peppered with new words and phrases that didn’t even exist a decade ago. ‘Domain Name‘ is one phrase of particular value to webmasters and Internet users alike.

Domain names are distinct titles that recognize unique sites on the web. All domain names become a portion of the URL, or website address. There are generally three main components to domain names, each separated by a dot.

To fully explain the nature and use of domain names, it’s best to use a concrete example. One of the most common and widely identified domain names on the web today is http://www.google.com. Virtually every Internet user is familiar with Google. As in all domain names, the first section is “www”, which stands for World Wide Web, the host server where the site is found. The second part, ‘google’, identifies the organization or company name. The third and final component, ‘.com’, mirrors the type of organization. Web addresses that end in ‘.com’ are generally considered to be top-level domain names.  Other top-level domain names used on the Internet include .org for an organization, .gov for government agencies, .net for a network, and .edu for an educational institution.

When searching online for websites, domain name experts contend that one of the best and easiest ways to locate organizations or companies is to incorporate the appropriate top-level domain name. Finding a particular site is easier if you know that the domain name ends in .org or .net. If you’re looking for the FBI website, you’ll try http://www.fbi.gov, because you know that it is a government site and will likely end with .gov.  An exact and concrete awareness of domain names is key to finding the desired site.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of domain names registered on the Internet. Creating a registering a good domain name makes your website stand out and become easier to find.