I’ve been creating websites for over 10 years now, and have had experience with a lot of web hosting companies. Often I get a client who thinks they are saving money by registering a domain and securing a hosting account themselves, before they contact me. Inevitably their hosting company is horrible, and we end up switching hosts at their expense, or I have to charge them a lot more to work around the inadequacies of the host they selected.

Here are a few things I’ve learned about web hosting companies over the years that may save you some pain and suffering:

Selecting a web hosting company:  Review sites are biased. Try to use a search engine to find a good web hosting company and you’ll get a bunch of review sites which rate web hosts and present you with a list of “the best.” The problem is that “the best” just happen to be the companies with affiliate programs the site owner belongs to. They get a cut of each customer who purchases hosting from the affiliated site.

If you want to narrow down your choice of web hosts, just search “[web host name here] sucks” or similar negative phrase. You’ll get a lot of interesting information.

Bundled Web Design / Web Hosting Packages: “Web solution” companies with cheap web design but significant monthly fees for hosting prey on people without a lot of knowledge of websites or the Internet. The cheap website will NOT be customized sufficiently for the business, and will look cheap. By the time the customer has figured that out, they have wasted a good deal of time and money. They are stuck with an ugly, user-hostile website and an overpriced monthly fee, or call it a complete loss and try again.

Hidden Web Hosting Nightmares: These are the things you only find out after you plunk down your money and upload your website.

• Super slow servers/network. 
• Buggy software
• Missing features
• Undisclosed limitations
• Incompetent, non-existent or slow customer support

Tips to Avoid Web Hosting Problems:

• Ask for recommendations. If you don’t have friends or business associates with relevant experience, go to a webmaster board and ask for recommendations. This may have to be offline if posting recommendations is against the board’s policy. Or just ask your web designer.
• Don’t base your decision on price and feature comparisons alone. That won’t  tell you anything. Sure the hosting package must include required features and be within your budget, but reliability and quality of support are the key differences between a horrible web host and a great web host.
• Search for negative comments on blogs or review sites. Keep in mind that people are more likely to complain than praise. There are a good number of people who are technically challenged and will blame a company for something that was caused by their own ignorance or unreasonable expectations. But once you start looking through the comments, you’ll get a pretty good idea about which companies are really rotten, and just out to rip off as many people as they can.

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.