How To Avoid Low Quality, Rip-Off Web Hosting Providers

The Internet has proven to be one of those earth-shaking innovations that totally reshapes human society, like the invention of the wheel. And humans being what they are, this wonderful new realm of the Internet has brought with it unscrupulous practitioners looking simply to take your money and run. Here are some tips on how to void low quality, rip-off web hosting providers.

Watch out for what’s known as long “lock-in” periods used by web hosting companies. For instance, when you see ultra-low prices, such as the familiar $0.95 per month, always check to see whether you’re required to prepay that amount for a long period, sometimes as much as two or three years. What this means in reality is that you’re going to be stuck with this web hosting provider for the next 24 to 36 months. Given how fast the Internet moves, how quickly things turnover in the digital world, is this really wise? Even if you supposedly have a 30-day trial period, you’ll likely find that how the provider counts 30 days is different from how normal people count 30 days, which means you’re out of luck – and money.

A corollary to the long lock-in period is a host with a setup fee. Once upon a time in the dark age of internet (think 10 years ago), setting up websites was a manual process; everything had to be coded by hand. Today, setups are automated, nearly untouched by human hands (meaning even a chimpanzee could tweak the code if need be). Don’t get fooled by set-up fees.

Unreasonable limitations are another sign of a bad web host. These include limits on how many domains you can have, daily bandwidth, maximum file sizes, database size, or not being able to use popular scripts such as PHP, Perl or Java. Another unreasonable limit is not being able to upload your own files via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Software. Instead you’re required to use the host’s online interface, which can be a real pain in the butt.

Another restriction to watch out for are web hosting providers that give you hundreds of gigabytes of disk space for data storage and thousands of gigabytes of bandwidth for high traffic, but restrict your file sizes to a few kilobytes and your database to only 10 megabytes. For instance, there are online hosting providers that claim to give users 3,000 gigabytes of bandwidth each month, but imposes a daily limit of 10 gigabytes on your traffic. Do the math – there’s no way you’re going to get more than 300 gigabytes of bandwidth a month with this kind of limit.

Rip-off web hosts also know to put their restrictions in the fine print of their contracts. This means that if you ask for your money back during the 30-day trial, you’ll likely to forced to pay a set-up fee of about a third of whatever the annual fee is. This also ties in to those long lock-ins we talked about earlier. You could lost as much as year’s worth of hosting fees this way.

Finally, be sure to note any limits or restrictions on high volumes of web traffic, i.e. bandwidth. If your site becomes popular and starts getting lots of visitors, a rip-off web host will hit you with a major bill for exceeding bandwidth limits – sometimes as high $15 or $20 per gigabyte over your usage limits. With a popular site, this cost mounts up fast.

Even on the Internet, the old Latin rule of commerce still holds: “Caveat emptor”, or “let the buyer beware.”

How To Avoid Low Quality, Rip-Off Web Hosting Providers 10.0101