Host Gator - Must Read Tips About The Hosting Industry
Avoid being taken for a ride
- Always test a host's support before joining
them!
- The truth to why many hosting plans are
scams.
- Never pay yearly!
- Never purchase your domain name from your
host.
- A few tests you can run to check how good a
host is.
- Why hosting directories lie, and the truth
to customer testimonials.
- The truth to a hosts uptime and guarantees.
1. Support
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Do not join a host without testing out their support first.
The best way to test out a host's support is calling in. You'll be
surprised how many hosts with an 800 number never answer their phones, or
have long hold times. E-mailing a hosting company or submitting a ticket
to their sales department is not the way to test a host! Many of the
companies have incredible response times when contacting their sales
department, very few have good times when contacting support. After all
they don't make money by supporting you. They only make money by selling
to you.
2. Scam Plans
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If it sounds too good too be true it usually is!
All hosts have the same basic limitations when it comes to
server resources and specs. There is no magic server that has a
never ending supply of RAM and CPU. If a host ever claims to
give unlimited space or bandwidth DO NOT JOIN THEM. The thing to
remember is that the average web site uses about 50 Megs space
and less then 1 gig bandwidth a month. So what hosting companies
do is they lie! They make up scam plans with tons of space and
bandwidth for around $8 bucks a month. It's a numbers game....
Only one or two of every 100 people that signup on the plan are
going to use all the bandwidth advertised. So what do they do?
They usually terminate the sites that use it saying "your site
is using too many resources." They aren't lying about the
resource usage. IT'S the truth! Most people don't realize that
bandwidth and space used have nothing to do with the server
resources being used. Resource usage has to do with the amount
of CPU and RAM a site uses. If a site uses a lot of bandwidth
they aren't kicked for using their bandwidth they are kicked for
using up most of the servers cpu and ram. Another thing to
remember is that the cheaper the plan is, and the more space /
bandwidth included the more sites per server the host will have
to pack in to make their money back. So the lesson here is don't
shop for a host based on their plans! You should shop based on
recommendations and experience!
3. Never Pay Yearly
Another thing you'll notice is that most of these incredible
scam plans force you to pay for a year up front to get the good
pricing. Why would a hosting company care if you pay monthly or
yearly? After all if you're happy with them you?re going to end
up staying much longer than a year. Merchant fees aren't that
much so why? It's because most have horrible support, slow
servers, or even tons of downtime. If you were paying month to
month you?re not going to stick around, but if you paid for a
year up front what are you going to do? You won't get your money
back so you have no choice but to stay with them. ONLY PAY
MONTHLY! We have one plan that requires a year payment up front
(hatchling) Why? because most hosts advertise a low monthly fee
if paid yearly and a much higher price if monthly. We still need
to be competitive so we made one plan showing this option. We
would however prefer you sign up for a monthly plan. Remember
paying yearly to anyone is always a bad idea, but the choice is
yours. We would do everything in our power to honor the year but
anything can happen to anyone. The state of Texas where our
servers are located could be wiped off the face of the earth. If
this happened we would most likely be out of business instantly
and have no way to honor your payment. All we're saying is no
matter how good a company is anything can come up, and you could
lose your upfront payment.
4. Domain Name Tips
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Do not join a host that includes a free domain name with
their hosting package, and never purchase your domain name from a hosting
provider, unless you are positive they will be putting your information in
the WHOIS (We do, most don't).If your information isn't in the whois they
could blackmail you into staying with them. For all technical purposes
whoever has their information in the whois is the owner. A domain owner
doesn't go by who paid for it; it goes by whose information is on the
whois. To check a whois on the domain go there and type "domainname.com"
and click submit. Whoever?s address, email, and phone number shows up is
the domain owner. We recommend purchasing a domain from
www.godaddy.com. |
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After you purchase the name, all you would do is put your host's dns in, and
your domain name will then point to your hosting company. If you aren't
sure how to change the dns, just watch our movies on it.
5. A few more tests to check out how legit a
company is
Do a whois on their domain name. Then look for the creation date
of the domain name. If the domain name was created less then a
year ago it's more of a risk to join that hosting company. They
could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new
hosts go out of business within a year that really isn't
something you should be taking a chance on. It's too easy to
become a hosting company. All someone has to do is join our
reseller plan and they are now a host. Sure the hosting may be
good, but that doesn't mean they are going to provide good
support nor does it mean they are going to pay their hosting
bill. We end up kicking resellers of ours all the time for not
paying their bills (after many warnings) and in many cases their
unsuspecting customers lose their site.
You could also test the speed of a host's network to your
location by...
Clicking start > run > type in "command" enter, and then type
"ping hostdomainname.com" wait for it to finish and look for the
average ping. The lower the number the better, and chances are
the faster your site will load if you should host with them. Any
number around an 80 average would be good. Anything over 100 is
very bad (unless you're living in another country from where the
host is based.)
6. Customer Reviews
Don't believe anything you read on the hosting directories. They
don't care who they recommend as they are all paid listings. The
highest bidder gets the spot. What you should do to find reviews
is search google using the company?s name. If they have been
around a year you should find many real reviews of people who
use their hosting. Another good place to check would be the
company's forum, but don't always believe what you see. If
someone writes something bad in the forum most hosts will delete
their post and ban the user... Our customer testimonial forum is
located here we can proudly say we support freedom of speech.
7. Uptime
If a hosting company claims 100% uptime they are lying. All
servers need to be rebooted every now and then for security and
software updates. If they never reboot that means their server
is insecure and they will eventually be hacked.
When a company guarantees an uptime, that doesn't make it true.
A host has as many uptimes as they have servers. It all depends
on what server they put you on, and how well they manage it from
the time you're put on it. We guarantee a 99.9 uptime but that
does not mean we will hit it every month for eternity. Our
guarantee means we give you a 100% refund for the month if we
should not hit it. Many hosting companies will give you a
prorated refund based on the amount of downtime. So say you pay
$10 for a month of hosting and your site is down for 24 / hours.
They will refund you for one day of downtime which ends up being
about 33 cents. A guarantee is worthless! What is worth
something is how they define the guarantee, and if they do in
fact honor it.
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