IIS Active

Web Hosting That Doesn’t Come With Fine Print

As a web developer who’s worked on a multitude of sites, I can safely say I’ve seen it all when it comes to web hosting. The lengths some companies go to in order to lure in customers who really don’t understand the technical details of what they’re signing up for is appalling. The most annoying thing from my perspective is the ones that advertise a really low price, sign up a client who then hires me to design their site, but leave me hanging in terms of support; or it turns out the site I built is dead in the water because their lowball hosting plan doesn’t include support for standard features. It isn’t the web hosting company the customer gets mad at when their fancy Flash intro won’t load, it’s me -because I’m the one who programmed it. That’s why, if I have any say at all in the matter, I steer my clients away from most web hosting companies, despite their claims of low pricing.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with offering a low price, it’s the way that most of these companies go about achieving it that annoys me. A web hosting company like webhostingpad.com does it the right way. They’re able to offer monthly rates of $1.99, which is the lowest I’ve seen. They don’t cut corners, so I’m guessing they can offer such low pricing because everything runs smoothly. They invest in top notch, name brand equipment, experienced support staff, and a state-of-the-art data center, so operations must run like a machine. They’re reliable (99.9% uptime is guaranteed) and must attract a huge number of clients, allowing them to also achieve economies of scale. So many of these other companies try to hit the low prices by doing things like buying up old servers made by companies no-one has heard of, not bothering with a backup generator for protection in case power goes out, having support that’s only available 8 hours a day, leaving virus scanning to their customers or avoiding customer satisfaction guarantees.

The other trick that cut-rate web hosting companies often pull (and this is the one that ends up really affecting me), is to neglect to inform their customers that the low, low rate doesn’t include services that I would consider necessary, or that their platform is incapable of handling certain technology a web designer relies on. I frequently end up suggesting to my clients that they either move to webhostingpad.com, or fork over the extra money to their existing web host to get features like weekly backups of their site, log files, additional domain hosting, an advanced firewall, a commerce shopping cart, blogging support (including Wordpress) and SPAM protection. And if it turns out that their site is incapable of supporting Flash or it can’t stream audio or video, I make it quite clear that it’s the web hosting company they need to talk to, because it’s not my code that’s broken.