Free Web Hosting
There is no concept of free lunch in the world, this is exactly true when we talk about free Web hosting for the webmasters. Before going ahead we must talk about what hosting exactly is; Hosting is the process of storing files onto a web server so that it can be accessible to viewers through a web browser.
A lot of new webmasters have to face the decision of choosing the right host for their website and what attracts them is free web hosting that is available all over the internet worldwide. But as mentioned earlier, the free web hosting never comes as FREE as it may sound, it comes with its own limitations such as lack of autonomous domain name.
For the new webmaster, the choice of finding the best host may be very much difficult and even in the case of free hosting providers; the decision is to get the most out of them as most of these free webhosts try to get benefits from those webmasters who plan to use their services. Besides been some limitations, the use of a small server place and non-ability of using the FTP clients, no domain name, lot of ads from the web company and very low benefits may be faced when looking for a free hosting. The webhosts thus try to cover their costs by displaying their ads or some other companies.
Whenever you look for the decision of finding the free web hosting, then there are a few things that one must consider, what is your requirement, what the web host is offering, how much space they are offering, any statistics, what domain name they offer, do they offer the ability to use your own domain name or provide name servers, do their provide email address capability, what sort of ads that they put on your website and where they put that? All these questions are very much important to be answered completely in order to decide the hosting service that you choose for free.
As far as the requirement is concerned, today websites are either static or dynamic, most of the free hosts provide static webhosting and if your website is dynamic then you will have to look for a host that gives you the ability to host your website with the scripting languages that you have used. Very less free hosting companies provide dyamic services and those who do provide have a lot of limitation, like no database availability and stuff like that. Similarly, the requirement is concerned with the space that they are providing, most free webhosts provide from 5MB-50 MB of web space depending upon various other factors, the more space that you use, the more benefits the web hosting company would take from you. Most of the free hosts don’t provide the use of your own domain names as it hinders their own benefits in this way. So, most of the times the web address that your website is uploaded becomes www.yourname.freehosting.com or www.freewebhosting.com/yourname
Besides giving the long URLs, another big issue of these free web hosts is their reliability which is always in question. It is often termed that most of the free host providers are one who have old servers and give free space so as to cover the cost by getting free advertising by providing space. That is why most of the free web hosts don’t assure you that servers will be running 24 hours a day without frequent breakdowns? Similarly, these free webhosts don’t offer a good bandwidth, hence you may be in a problem if your website is popular and it gets beyond the server bandwidth limit and it will block your website till next month.
So, keeping all the factors in mind, free web hosting is not bad, if you are just trying your hands out on the web and want to explore without paying much. Free web hosting have its own set of limitations but are extremely helpful for the newbies to make their impressions on the web.
Yasir Nisar is a 25 years old poet, writer, freelance journalist, script writer, director, software engineer and web master of many websites. He has been writing when he was in his early teens and till then he has written thousands of articles, tens of poems, have handled edited many magazines, directed as well scripted many shows and music videos. He has been handling and managing his own software house where he specializes in web marketing, web development, web promotion and technical writing. He can be reached at yani@yasirnisar.com or at his website http://www.yasirnisar.com
Reseller Web Hosting
What is Reseller Web Hosting?
Reseller web hosting gives a company an opportunity to purchase large amounts of web space with the intention of packaging it for resale purposes. These web hosting plans, help the “reseller” to be a middle-man by allowing him/her to create and brand an image, find customers, and finally, host them on the servers owned by the hosting company.
This business allows the reseller of web hosting to strategically investigate market demands and creatively answer via competitive pricing and package content. Lastly, it is mutually beneficial to the web host, as their servers remain full and profitable.
=| Advantages: |==
Besides the entrepreneurial aspects of being able to create a brand and have another company actually provide the web hosting service, reseller hosting has some interesting advantages and features including:
* Resellers possess the opportunity to offer other services, to be used in conjunction with web hosting accounts. These include merchant accounts, SSL Certificates, search engine optimization, and domain name registration, which all may provide additional income for the reseller.
* Resellers can avoid the expenses involved in maintaining their own in-house web servers, mail servers, DNS servers, backup generators and other network hardware and connections required to host Internet web sites
* Resellers are able to respond to increasing numbers of businesses and individuals that are migrating to the web. A rich target demographic exists.
* Resellers can purchase packages based on his/her sales forecasts for their use of hard disk space, allowance of data transfer, and a variety of other add-on options.
* Web hosting resellers can pursue scalability, where purchases from the web host will directly correlate to growth of one’s business.
* Web hosting resellers can enjoy high profits compared to initial investments.
* Resellers are offered nice multi-level graphical user interfaces that can automate the processes of managing domains and customers, which makes the profession of reseller web hosting more enjoyable.
=| DisAdvantages: |==
Clearly, the benefits and advantages of reseller web hosting outweigh the disadvantages. However, the major premise of establishing a business model surrounding another vendor’s services may at times be a daunting task.
For example, proper research must be done while selecting a reseller web hosting provider, especially if your brand and total business responsibility depend on a 99.99% uptime. True investigation should be done to ensure that the reseller web hosting company will be in business and will provide the level of service that has been promised to a reseller’s customer.
Furthermore, reseller features such as hard disk space and data transfer allowance will need to be monitored so that if these metrics are exceeded, one can easily upgrade plans rather than be hit with hefty “ala carte” expenses associated with overage penalties.
=| Benefits: |==
Reseller web hosting allows the major benefit of revenue stream generation for the companies who don’t have the time, money, or resources to maintain their own servers and data centers. Furthermore, it is a great business opportunity for those who want to create a stand-alone business venture, or for those with other parallel businesses who can take advantage of the chance to sell hosting with their services.
What is the best application of a reseller web hosting service provider?
The major benefit of reseller hosting plans is that the reseller is allowed to purchase web space for a reduced cost. At that time, the reseller can sell the web hosting plan and/or use some of the space for his/her own projects.
The best application and intentions are revenue-based and several schemes exist for this:
1. The reseller can create his or her own brand, market it, and successfully sell and support the web hosting plans. Then the customer can contact the reseller for support.
2. The reseller can just act as an affiliate or an agent for the web hosting company. In this way, the reseller is minimizing liability of service provision, but still reaps benefits of revenue once customers purchase. Customers would contact the original web host for support and future plan modifications.
3. The reseller can be “hired” on as a proxy employee. In this model, the reseller can create accounts as an “employee” of the original web host.
=| How to decide: |==
Generally, just as one would decide on any other web hosting plan, there are some main concerns that exist. Possible resellers should always investigate concerns such as:
1. Having a large enough site and the ability to market through various channels to justify the initial costs involved with the reseller packages.
2. The cost, as compared to other web space vendors with similar plans and packages.
3. Security of Data and equipment of the company that the reseller purchases with.
4. High enough bandwidth for the number of sites and the types of sites the reseller will support.
5. The level of knowledge and integrity of the web hosting provider
6. The service level agreements for technical support and hardware repairs from the web hosting provider
7. The speed of the page downloads and uptime of the company’s web pages.
Furthermore, because one is putting their name on the brand, it is imperative to further investigate hardware. Some of the factors to consider are:
Brand: Brand names of hardware convey reputations for reliability and known support for hardware failures.
CPU’s:The speed of the CPU’s in the servers will directly correlate with the load speeds of customer websites.
Memory:The reseller web host should allow one to know that the very important commodity of memory will be readily available, as an increased number of sites running various types of code and scripts may prove to be resource and memory intensive.
Mirrored Drives:To offer backups to potential customers, it is good to further investigate backup options. To ensure data redundancy, most hosts can offer drive mirroring, which will keep a synchronized copy of all data for easy backups.
Features specific to reseller hosting can be numerous also. Generally, it is advantageous to look for a reseller plan that offers nice plans with value-driven offerings in disk space, bandwidth, and 24×7 support. One can also look for plans that offer free account setups with no contracts.
Other reseller specific perks to look for include:
Hosting ability:UNLIMITED site hosting will allow one to package their web space any way that they choose for resale purposes.
Private name servers :further reinforces branding and makes you look like a stand-alone network.
Administration software:This software allows the reseller to divide the web space into packages. On the end-user side, it also gives them administration rights to their website.
The benefits of reseller web hosting seem to far outweigh the disadvantages. With proper business planning, reseller web hosting seems to be a great addition to a company’s products.
About the Author
Rodel Garcia is a freelance programmer and web developer. Owner and webmaster of
http://web-hosting-service-directory.com/web-hosting-reseller-program.html
Web hosting reviews search strategy
Web hosting reviews search strategy
The search for web hosting reviews is a very important (if not the most important) part of your whole web hosting shopping strategy. Shopping for hosting is not exactly easy because today’s hosting offer is very-very vast. It is huge! There are thousands of bigger and smaller web hosting companies. And there are cheap, not-so-cheap and expensive web hosting services.
Economically or mathematically, you should go for the cheap solution. After all, if you can get the same thing for fewer dollars (or euros or whatever) it makes sense to go for it. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple because “on paper” you are promised similar things. In reality, you will or you will not get what you were promised. It might not be very difficult to find web hosting companies (just go to DMOZ – hosting category and you’ll find enough web hosting companies to visit a whole week) but what can you do to select the really good ones?
Using web hosting forums
If you take two web hosting companies that offer similar packages at different prices you might be tempted to believe that the one that charges more would provide a better service. This is not necessarily true. My opinion is that the only real and effective criterion in selecting between two or more web hosting companies is to obtain real reviews from real customers.
My favorite places to look for web hosting reviews are the open forums. Anyone (you and me included) is free to express himself/herself there and so are the web hosting customers and almost every time anything we post remains there unedited by third parties (as long as we are polite and we follow the rules of each particular forum).
Forums have some limitations of course, such as business owners writing favorable reviews for their own company or business competitors that write negative reviews about competitors, but these are rare cases and fortunately, if there are any doubts regarding the credibility of the reviewer, the forum participants ask for explanations. So, in general, the public forums are a valuable tool for finding out what’s the reputation of a certain hosting company.
Now, not all reviews are the same. Some are more valuable than others. For example, while some are really detailed, some are really basic “yes, I use xyz company and it’s really great.” It is also important who writes the review.
If the reviewer has more than 100 posts in the forum I tend to give more credit to his words. Also, if the profile includes a website (a www or website button), this ultimately gives you some reassurance that the person has nothing to hide.
My favorite web hosting forums are WebHostingTalk (aka WHT) and HostHideout. I especially visit WebHostingTalk because it’s much more populated than the others and it has a more customer focused approach compared to HostHideout, which is essentially a forum geared towards hosts and their problems. If you’d like to visit more web hosting chats and forums you can find some at DMOZ – web hosting chats and forums.
Now lets suppose that you decided to search for reviews about the company “BogusHosting” (not a very good name, is it? ). The first step would be to go to the Search page of that forum (almost every forum has a search page). Then all you have to do is type the name BogusHosting in the appropriate field. A good idea is to look for “Bogus Hosting” too, as some users might’ve put a space between those two words when reviewing.
Then basically all you have to do is press the “search” button and the results will appear. When I’m at WHT I often select the “Search titles only” option. That yields less but much more valuable search results.
If the results do not not satisfy you (not enough of them or inconclusive) then you can create a new thread and ask for customer reviews on that company (that usually means you have to register on that forum – it’s free if it’s an “open” forum). My advice is to first select 2 (maximum 3) web hosting companies that really interest you. Then ask for opinions about them. Do not use a thread to ask opinions on 10 companies. You get better results if you concentrate on just a few. Also specify that you’re looking for customer reviews to prevent people from posting “I heard that they’re good/bad” stuff.
Most likely, if you select those 2 or 3 companies the right way (based on already existing customer reviews), you’ll find that they’re all very good and that you can choose any one of them, which is kind of nice . This is the only time when I would think about saving a few bucks by going with the one that’s cheaper. But! You might want to Test those web hosting companies first!
I like the hosting companies that have a forum of their own (often called a support forum). Hosts use such forums to allow customers to interact to each other and also as an alternative means to provide support. Not all such forums can be used by people other than their clients. Often though, you can register (for free) and post presales questions or just participate in the discussions.
Great is the fact that you can see what/if problems occur often and how problems are dealt with. The ultimate benefit is that you can contact their customers and find out what they think about the service: are they satisfied, did they notice certain problems that never get solved etc.
The way the company manages the support forum is also important. If they make a habit out of deleting threads that might damage their image instead of acknowledging problems and doing their best to solve them, I would not use their service. I believe it’s an unprofessional manner of handling such things.
Also, some companies close the support forums when serious problems occur. This deprives the customers from a means of communication. Sure, they might still have the helpdesk, email and others at their disposal, but just try to imagine how frustrating this can be though when you’re looking for answers while you’re having problems. You sign-up considering that you’ll be able to contact other customers in times of trouble and share information. A closed support forum prevents you from enjoying this advantage.
To find out about these things try to contact their customers, start a new thread asking for this kind of feedback or spend some time on their forums carefully watching for suspicious things.
Using web hosting directories
Web hosting directories that have advanced search capabilities are indeed very useful for finding hosts offering what you need in your price range. This is something that hosting directories can be good at. Two such directories that also happen to collect reviews, but which do not seem to influence the results to their liking, are Findmyhosting.com and Webhostingratings.com. I especially find the advanced search at Findmyhosting to be very good.
The two directories I mentioned, because they seem to collect reviews in a trustworthy fashion, could be also useful in assessing hosts’ credibility.
So now you have 4 ways to verify a host’s credibility: web hosting forums, the host’s own support forum (that is if they have one, that’s true), plus 2 websites where the reviews are reasonably believable.
Notes of caution
If a company does not have a 30-days-no-questions-asked-money-back-guarantee or a free one month trial, I advise you not to pay for a whole year in advance. Pay monthly. If things turn out to be less than what you expected, you might be able to move without losing much money. Actually, I wouldn’t pay yearly from the start anyway. I would pay monthly at first and, after a while, maybe I would pay yearly. Maybe!
Reading those threads can be a very time consuming task. It can sometimes take you more than 4 hours to read all the threads about a single company. If you decide not to use my list of selected web hosting companies, be prepared to spend a lot of time searching and reading on those forums.
No hosting company will have only happy customers. So don’t worry if you find an occasional negative review or opinion. Look at how the situation is handled by the host (usually the host replies). Also keep in mind that unhappy customers are much more likely to complain than happy customers are to praise.
With that, I wish you success in finding a very good, honest web hosting company.
http://www.whreviews.com
Presales questions and purchasing Web Hosting
Presales questions and purchasing hosting
Introduction
Nice imaginative subtitle huh? Well, imaginative or not, there was a need for an introduction, mainly to express a few of my own thoughts on the matter at hand.
As you might know by now, when making buying decisions I value very much the information coming from people outside of the hosting company (namely customers), my main reasoning being that, in order to close the sale, a company’s sales representative might conceal things or even lie.
Despite that, presales questions, whether by email or other means, do provide valuable information to us as potential customers. Note that the presales questions are to be sent to the sales department, not to the support department.
What’s the purpose of presales questions?
Sending an email with presale questions will give us, the potential hosting customers, the opportunity to measure things like how fast the response is, how correct the answers are, the level of detail given and the attitude towards the customer.
Often times, as I already noted in the “Testing Support” article, the response coming from the sales department is not as rapid as one coming from support. Some of the big hosts with many employees go as far as not to answer sales enquiries during weekends, although support for customers is available during that time.
With that said, as a general rule, responses from the sales departments to enquiries made by email should not take longer than 24 hours. Obviously the sooner the response comes, the better.
Note that this article comes as a completion to the rest of the things that I wrote so far, so there are things that I do not detail nor even mention here, but which are presented in detail in other articles of mine.
Steps to be taken
A first step should be to send an email with a few fairly basic questions. Things that are general, and yet fairly important and potentially incommode, like “How long have you been in business?”.
The first email allows you to introduce yourself and to see what’s their first reaction. Do they want your business or not? Do they answer your questions carefully and in detail or just skimp them? Are they polite? Do they use English the right way (spelling and grammar)?
If they pass the first email test, meaning they’ve done a good job on average (there are no clear grades here) then a second email makes sense.
In the second email you could ask them if their features include everything that is necessary for your website to work. It’s especially important to let the host know things about your website: what scripts you use, what’s the scripting language in which they were written, how often the database is accessed on average and how much bandwidth your website consumes. Very busy sites can be resource intensive and are no longer suited for a shared environment. They need a server of their own.
Of course, if you’re just starting you have no statistics so it’s all going to be a guess work.
An important note: try not to ask questions which have already been answered on their website, as the host might not want your business anymore. Lazy, unattentive customers are generally not desired. It might come as a surprise to some, but yes, businesses choose their customers too.
Despite what I said earlier, it could help to include one or two questions that were already answered on their site, to see if the staff knows its job well.
More emails should be exchanged if new questions arise from the discussion. Some, those who feel comfortable over the phone (I don’t, I’m too shy ) and live close enough to the host to easily afford a phone call, should contact the host by phone too. Emails work great, but some things can be weighted a lot better on the phone. Things that are hidden in the tone of the voice.
Things to ask
There are things that are good to know about the host. For that I’ve created a list of questions. Also to be noted is the fact that the tougher the questions you ask, the more respect you usually get from a good host and the less interest a scammer has to keep answering your questions. Knowledgeable people are not exactly their market target.
Now here are the questions with some explanations that I felt necessary:
1. Do you have uptime statistics from a third party monitoring service like Alertra or some others? Please give me a link where I can view them easily.
A good host keeps track of its servers’ uptime to verify if the uptime guarantee was respected, to be notified when downtime happens and to defend itself when customers wrongly complain about downtime (when perhaps it was only a local ISP’s issue).
Two things are also important here: how often the statuses of the servers are checked by the monitoring service and how long is the history of the uptime records. It’s one thing to check the servers once an hour and one thing to check them every five minutes. The more often the checks, the more accurate the uptime records.
Also, the longer the history, the better. It’s one thing to know that a server had 100% uptime for a month, a goal which is rather easily attainable, and another to know that it had let’s say 99.95% uptime in the last two years.
2. How long have you been in business?
Web Hosting is an industry and like in any industry experience has to count for something. Two things have to be separated here though: there is corporate experience and individual experience, meaning that there are businesses that have been in active a long while and are thus experienced and there are new companies started by very experienced people who have worked in the industry for a long time. In both cases experience is an asset that they do possess, just that in the second case it’s harder to actually prove it.
3. How many employees do you have?
A high number of employees often means higher dependability, meaning that the chances that the host will disappear over night are slimmer. Don’t forget though that the answer to this question is only a claim which is almost impossible for you to verify.
4. Do you outsource sales/support or is it all “in house”?
Quite a few hosting businesses outsource part or all of the support or (less often) sales. Depending on how well things are organized and how professional their manpower suppliers are, things can work out great or be a total miss.
The reasoning behind outsourcing is to lower the costs which often is translated into lower prices for the customers too. It’s a way to be competitive. There are hosts doing great with outsourced support and hosts who failed at using this avenue effectively. This is also true about hosts having all their staff “in house” though.
It’s a good question to ask though. A host openly recognising “we outsource” is sincere and I like sincerity. It goes hand in hand with honesty.
5. What’s the expected time for initial response on support issues and what’s the average time until final resolution?
Pretty much self-explanatory. You can’t really see if they speak the truth or not, but you can compare your “live results” to what they’ve claimed and see if they spoke the truth or not. Remember, the purchasing decision is not final. It never is. You need to keep testing things and always watch out for signs that things might be slipping out of hand.
Also note that the automated answer machines and the email autoresponders shouldn’t be counted as “initial responses”. They’re just automated confirmations of message receipt and nothing more. They convey no information.
6a. Are you selling from a reseller account?
Many hosts will frown once they read this question. It’s one of the most dreaded questions that a potential customer can ask a host that sells from a reseller account. Some hosts, even those that are not selling from reseller accounts will argue that the reseller status of a host has no meaning, that it’s the level of service that caracterises a host as good or bad. I happen to agree, but only to a point.
Unfortunately the reseller’s business depends on the quality of the service of the upstream provider. In the attempt to maximise profits, too many resellers go for bottom of the barrel hosts that turn out to be less that OK. When the server is down, the reseller can only ask for resolution, not act effectively.
6b. Who’s your host?
This is the question that resellers fear the most. I warn you, don’t expect them to give you an answer. The question is unfair and it’s all too natural for them to refrain from sharing this information with you. If they tell you who their provider is you could just go there and get (in theory) the same hosting service, only cheaper. Whatever effort they’ve made to lead you to their website (meaning advertising) would then be wasted.
7. How secure is my credit card information? Convince me that I’m safe to use it.
8. Do you have your own datacenter?
Most hosts that market shared hosting rent their servers from big providers who have datacenters. A datacenter is a major investment. It makes a lot sense for a regular host to rent servers until the business grows to a certain size. For some hosting customers this added layer (datacenter-host) might not be to their liking, the reasoning being that the host depends on the datacenter’s staff for some things.
9. What means of contact do I have, as a customer, to get in touch with your support team?
The most common means of contact are email, helpdesk, trouble ticket system, forum, phone, instant messaging (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger etc.) and LiveChat. Generally the more they are, the better, for redundancy reasons.
Phone support is thought by some to be a sign of seriousness. I do think that a business – any business – should have a phone number, but not necessarily for support. This is the Internet, there are plenty of other ways to contact the host. The phone number might be used only for sales and other business purposes.
10. Do you offer a moneyback guarantee? What are the conditions for eligibility?
I’ve discussed the moneyback guarantee in more detail in the Moneyback Guarantees article.
11. What’s your uptime guarantee? How will I be compensated if you will fail to meet the level that you guarantee?
This I’ve also discussed in more detail in a dedicated article: The uptime guarantee.
12. Will I have access to a control panel? Which control panel do you offer?
It would be highly unusual for a host not to offer a control panel, but you never know. Go with a host that offers one, preferably one that you’re used to.
13. Is the support free?
Yes, this is a good question to ask if you don’t find the answer on the website. Although very rare, some hosts charge for it. There are also hosts that don’t offer support at all. Wouldn’t that make for an unpleasant surprise?
14. Is the support available 24/7, meaning is there always someone (awake) in front of a desktop ready to read and answer my questions? Is it also available by phone?
The question includes the definition of 24/7 support so there can be no doubt on what you mean. Some people are very fond of 24/7 support by phone. I’m not, but if you really need (or want) it, look for hosts who offer it. (Don’t forget to test it and see if it’s really 24/7!)
15. What software is installed on the server? What version? (operating system, web server, php, etc)
Usually the newer the version the better, but sometimes the host might postpone upgrading until most of the bugs in the newer version are taken care of. If you need something (like a certain version of PHP, MySql etc, this is the time to ask for it.)
16. What are the specs of the servers you generally use? What specs will have the server on which my website will reside?
Some people want their websites to be hosted on high end, well equipped machines, reasoning that the more powerful the machine, the better the performance. Fact is that a host will usually put more websites on a more powerful machine, which will diminish the advantage of computing power, although, if not overloaded and properly configured, it might remain faster.
Look to be hosted on a machine that the host is used to have. If you’re to be hosted on a powerful machine that they’ve never used before there is a risk of them overestimating it’s computing power and overload it.
17. How many websites do you put on a server?
More often than not the number varies from one machine to another, based on the types of websites each of them hosts, on the type of the machine etc. If the websites on a server are more CPU intensive than the ones on another machine, it will be able to handle fewer websites.
18. What’s the maximum amount of CPU usage I’m allowed to use on a consistent basis? What’s your general “resources abuse” policy? How are the offending websites treated?
This is a very important. Compare the answers between the different hosts and see who gives the best answer.
In the best cases the offending websites are temporarily moved on a free (or almost free) server. The owner is then notified and asked to either upgrade to a semidedicated, or dedicated solution or to change hosts if he so chooses.
19. What’s your servers’ average load? What’s the average load of the server where you’ll have my website hosted? How about average CPU usage?
The lower the numbers the better. Compare that between the hosts you’re considering (make sure you understand what the server load is).
20. How fast will the account be created?
Some hosts boast instant activation (which has an obvious benefit for the customer) while some take their time to create a new account, but for a good reason: to make sure that the buyer is not a fraud.
Don’t be offended, you have no reason to be. In the end it’s good to know that the host takes care that few unworthy people get access on their servers. These unworthy individuals might be hackers or spammers. You don’t want them to be your “neighbors”.
21. Is the account scalable? How does the upgrade occur? Is there a fee involved other than the higher monthly price?
It’s important for you to be able to upgrade to a larger plan as needed (obviously up to the point when your website needs a whole server in terms of resources).
22. What’s the price for excess bandwidth and space?
Usually a sudden burst of traffic is a reason for joy, but if you happen to use more bandwidth than you were allocated, it can be a pricey business if the excess consumption bears a hefty price.
23. Is there a daily bandwidth limit?
Most hosts only have a monthly bandwidth limit. It is easier to estimate with relative precision how much bandwidth you might need in a month than to estimate the daily bandwidth consumption. That’s why you must be careful about hosts putting a cap on your daily hosting bandwidth. Read carefully how things are handled in case of excess use.
24. Are there any limits on file size?
Again, most hosts don’t limit the maximum size of a file that you can host under your account (as long as it’s within your account’s limits of course). Be careful and ask to make sure, especially if you plan to host big files.
25. How often will you back-up my website? Are the backups kept on or off site?
Obviously more often is better. Off site is also better because if for some reason the datacenter burns down, the back-up would be destroyed as well.
26. Is there a setup fee?
Setup fees used to be the norm in the early days of hosting, a partial reason being that setting up an account was not as easy as it is today and that setup fee covered the time it took to create the account.
Nowadays setup fees are often used as a way to encourage people to commit to hosting for longer periods of time. If you want to pay monthly or quarterly you’ll not only pay more that if you’d pay yearly (usually that’s how it is) but you’ll also be charged a hefty setup fee. This obviously makes people seriously consider paying yearly.
As a general rule it’s safer to pay monthly and once you build up the confidence that the host is indeed good you can consider paying yearly to save a few dollars. If the feedback from the customers is exceptional and you’re that confident that the host will be very good, you could pay yearly, but be aware that you’re assuming a risk. In the end it’s all a matter of trust.
Usually the moneyback guarantee only covers you for the first 30 days of the whole year and not many hosts will prorate a refund. What if the service starts to crumble 45 days after you paid for it? It’s a very common story: “I paid for a whole year so now I’m stuck. I can’t afford/don’t want to pay again to move to another host.”
27. How many months do I have to pay in advance for?
Some hosts don’t allow monthly payments, just quarterly, semiannually and so on. There are even hosts who only accept yearly payments. Sometimes the price is expressed in number of dollars per month but an asterisk points to the fact that the figure is true just for yearly payments. So be careful. If anything is unclear ask first, money later.
28. Is a domain included in the price?
Sometimes the domain is included in the price (usually when you pay for a longer period of time). Generally I advise not to buy a domain from your host and especially not get it bundled with the hosting fee. Yes, I know most hosts will not like this advice either, but again I will side with you, the customer. You are much safer getting the domain from a well known registrar than getting it from your new host. You’re definitely sure then that the registered domain name will be have your name on it.
See, some unscrupulous hosts buy the domain you requested and let you use it, but they are the ones who “own” the domain. If you want to move to a new host you’ll find yourself “jailed” as the host will not give your the domain that you paid for. That’s a very bad situation to be in.
29. Do you have a free trial so that I can test the service?
Note that many hosts don’t have a free trial because this exposes them to all kinds of problems like spammers and hackers trying to abuse this feature.
30. Do you allow adult content to be hosted on your servers?
This is important if you want to upload adult content on their server or if you have something against sharing the server with adult websites. Also some people are quite certain that adult websites attract more hackers and that the server might be compromised more often. I have yet to see a serious research on the subject though.
31. If you use specific scripts (forums, shopping carts, etc. ) ask if they allow you to use them
Some hosts don’t allow certain scripts to be run on their machines so to make sure ask first.
32. Will a shared account be OK for this? (explain what your website is and does, monthly traffic etc)
If the website is already active, tell them how busy the site is. This information, along with the scripts that you use (considering they’re known, fairly popular scripts) will allow the host to estimate your usage of resources and thus tell you if your website suits their shared hosting environment or not.
33. Will I have SSH and/or Telnet access?
Many hosts refrain from giving access to such a powerful feature to all customers on shared hosting accounts. SSH is potentially as dangerous as it is useful in the hands of a skillful person.
34. Do you have a site builder that I could use?
If you don’t have a website yet, you have no HTML knowledge and you still want to build your website on your own, you will find a site builder to be quite useful.
35. Is there a limit on how many emails can be sent per hour?
This is quite important if you have a mailing list of some kind.
36. Do I have access to Raw logs? Do you have a traffic analyser installed?
I talked about this in detail in the Traffic Analysis article.
37. What type of payments do you accept?
Accepting credit cards is the norm these days, but for some customers this is not helping. Most hosts will also accept money orders, checks, PayPal etc. , but not necessarily list this information on their website. That’s why you have to ask each host about the payment method you prefer.
38. Read the TOS and ask about anything that seems strange or you find hard to understand to be explained – or just delete the host off your list
39. How many clients do you have?
Generally I don’t consider the number of clients as an important gauge of the seriousness of a host. Also one thing to note is that the number of clients is not necessarily equal with the number of websites they host.
40. How many servers do you operate?
More important is how well the servers are managed though…
41. Can you give me a list with some of your customers? I would like to get some feedback from them.
Most serious hosts will refrain from doing such a thing for customer privacy reasons. Not that a host that gives you a list is not serious. They might have a list with websites of customers who have agreed to have their websites given as an example.
42. There are thousands of hosts out there, why should I buy from you?
Although listed way down here this is a very important question. Can they convince you that they’re the right host for you?
Wrap-up
Yes, I know, another intelligent subtitle. That’s all that I could think of at this late hour in the night though.
Now, ss you can see, the number of questions is not a small one and most likely you’ll have a few of your own to add to these, so try your best to find as many answers as possible on the host’s website. A huge list of questions would annoy anyone. Also note that you don’t necessarily need answers to all the questions that I listed here.
http://www.whreviews.com
Unmetered bandwidth in the shared Web Hosting environment
Unmetered bandwidth in the shared hosting environment. A new trend? A new concept?
Why this article?
A certain rather well known and fairly reputable hosting company that was offering budget hosting switched to offering shared hosting with unmetered bandwidth usage. Soon after that we heard of another company, with even more experience than the first one, switching to a similar offer.
This resulted in at least two long threads at Webhostingtalk.com, discussing this type of offer. I participated in those threads – I just had to – but I’ve also decided to express my point of view here, for you to read. Besides, as a side effect, I’ll be able to put my thoughts in order.
Unmetered vs Unlimited
In the shared hosting arena the word unmetered has its share of fans. Often times when discussing the use of the word “unlimited”, people have argued that it’s just a matter of semantics, that it must be obvious to anyone that unlimited hosting can’t be really taken at face value, so there’s no harm done when hosts use it in relation with bandwidth or space. They argue that unlimited means “as much as a regular/normal/standard/average website may need”. Thing is, there is no true standard/regular/normal/average website.
Some people acknowledge the fact that unlimited is not an acceptable word to use when describing bandwidth, that it can be considered deceiving, but sustain that “unmetered” would be the right term for it. Well now, let’s see, is it really?
Unmetered means — in our context — “unmeasured”. However, some of the companies offering it explicitly mention an initial limit that once reached will be upgraded upon request (no charge). So their system does in fact measure the data traffic consumption. What they don’t do (or claim not to do) is to limit on the consumption. True, they don’t do that after you sign-up – at least not directly.
Reasons for hosts to offer unmetered bandwidth
Back to basics: a business exists to profit. That’s its purpose and the role of its employees is to make whatever is needed to maximize profits.
So, how would offering unmetered bandwidth increase profits? By sheer volume. Significantly increased sales with smaller profits per account could potentially translate into higher total profits.
In the case of serious businesses, the decision to gamble by offering unmetered bandwidth is based on mathematical reasoning and it’s a calculated risk: statistics – the cornerstone of all rational overselling decisions.
However, hosts have devised a way to not take that risk, for in order to qualify for unmetered bandwidth a website must fit certain requirements. But, I get ahead of myself.
Why would unmetered sell better than a quota?
Obviously it’s all in the perceived value, for it’s never what you sell, but what the customer thinks he’s buying. The targeted customer (for there is a certain type of customer to whom this offer is aimed at) will feel that he gets more for less. After all, isn’t unmetered bandwidth supposed to give more than its fixed counterpart?
Another reason is one that I heard from the customers themselves: they don’t get to worry about being charged for going over their bandwidth allotment. It’s a sort of guarantee that higher traffic won’t translate into higher charges. It’s risk reversal all over again — or at least that’s how they see it.
The business proposition ultimately is: “Worry-free hosting! Sign-up now and you don’t have to worry about hosting ever again! You’ll get everything you need for a fixed fee.”
The target market
Obviously there must be a target market for all product/service offers and it doesn’t take much to suspect that the target market in this case isn’t formed by the people with websites that will take advantage of the full power of the offer.
To ensure that things will be manageable, certain types of websites are typically not eligible for unmetered bandwidth:
- Those that offer file downloads (software, video, mp3s etc.)
- Those that host image galleries (they are notorious for both high bandwidth and high server resources usage)
- Those that contain popular forums
- Portals and other types of communities
- Adult websites
- Chats
It’s also relatively common to see a restraint like “90% of the files must be linked from HTML/PHP/ASP etc. type of pages.” Translated, this means that the website must be content driven.
*Note that some hosts are more restrictive than others and some are less restrictive, meaning some go to greater lengths to protect themselves while others are willing to take more chances (we’ll see if it’s really so).
Most of these restrictions are also used by the hosts offering unlimited bandwidth, which is not that strange if we remember that unmetered bandwidth is almost directly derived from the concept of unlimited hosting.
Now, if we examine those restrictions, it’s very hard to imagine a website that can use huge amounts of bandwidth (to actually take advantage of the unmetered bandwidth offer) and not fall in one of the categories above. So, what’s the point then?
Well, the point is simple. Unmetered bandwidth as such would be overselling taken to a whole new level. However, in order to ensure profitability (or long term sustainability if you will) hosts have taken these very serious safety precautions. In my opinion, the more restrictions the more I feel it’s talk the talk but rarely – if ever – walk the walk, meaning they make it virtually impossible for a customer to take them up on the unmetered bandwidth offer.
Why? Well, it’s not just because of all those limitations above. Should it happen for a website to get through that maze of rules and end up being eligible for unmetered bandwidth, the host will still stop it from taking what would constitute the true advantage of the offer.
There’s one clause that gives the host all the power, one clause that is above all the others. “One ring to rule them all.” That is the “server resources abuse” clause, for everything bows in front of this little but powerful rule.
If your website uses so much CPU power and memory that it affects the performance of other websites on the server, the host will suspend it.
You might ask yourself: Why go through all that trouble of specifying types of websites who are not eligible if you have this clause?
To answer that we must look at the effect of those limitations: Only websites with very little chances of using over a few GBs per month are eligible for the offer. As a side effect, those websites stand little chance of tripping over any resources abuse threshold. So the mighty powerful clause will most likely never be used – and this is a great thing for the host.
Often times customers have no idea what’s written in the TOS (such a boring read puts off almost anyone) and that clause comes to them as a shock. In that shock they might publicly voice their dissatisfaction of having their website suspended. That’s a kind of publicity most hosts can do without.
How do they, the hosts, explain it?
One idea is that bandwidth limits are no longer meaningful, that much more meaningful are for example the usage of CPU and memory. As per the description of unmetered bandwidth the ultimate thing that limits bandwidth consumption is the amount of server resources used.
Personally I would have little against this change, provided that:
1. The individual data transfer consumption would indeed not be monitored by the host
2. The resources usage would be measured and visible in the control panel so that the user will be able to know at any time if he used too much resources that month/day/hour/instant or not. Also the user should be guaranteed a certain level (share) or resources.
If the first condition is not satisfied, then the very idea of unmetered is disputable. After all, if you sell something and you meter each user’s consumption, why call it unmetered? However, one might say this is not that important. That it’s just semantics. Maybe.
But speaking of semantics: based on the underlying definition, unmetered bandwidth as it is currently advertised is in fact the old unlimited bandwidth repackaged in a nicer, somewhat less deceiving wrapper.
Now let’s take a look at how things have arrived at this point (unmetered bandwidth I mean). As one WHT user (Umbillycord) used to suggest in his signature, the bandwidth allowances have reached such huge dimensions that this bandwidth quotas war starts to make little sense, especially when the whole war is fueled by overselling, rather than decreases in real costs.
Anyway, instead of increasing the bandwidth each month, in a never ending attempt to either be cheaper than the competition or to simply keep up with it, a person might semi-rationally come to the conclusion of just calling it unlimited/unmetered and be done with it.
This is what happens (at least in part) with this unmetered bandwidth trend. The limits of overselling have been pushed times and times again and the bandwidth quotas along with it — the next ground breaking limit to be used becomes “no boundary”.
One idea that I like
I like the idea of shared hosting being limited by the amount of resources used, instead of bandwidth. Unfortunately measuring bandwidth is a tough to break standard.
Limiting plans based on resources rather than bandwidth would be a step forward in the industry and it would make all the difference between unlimited bandwidth as it had always been advertised and a true new concept that could be named “shared hosting with unmetered bandwidth and specified server resources”.
Everything from the customer’s perspective
Leaving aside any subjective factors, let’s try to weight unmetered bandwidth and see if we can use it to our advantage (our because I’m referring to us, the customers).
Unmetered bandwidth often comes in the price range of approximately $10. It’ll most likely come with some 1000Mb of space, all of this from a host that specialises in budget hosting. The main benefit of unmetered hosting: no worries for small sites that they’ll go over their quota and pay huge amounts for the extra bandwidth.
However, considering that most sites eligible for unmetered bandwidth would hardly go over 5GB of monthly data transfer, the same effect could be obtained by signing-up for a plan with 10Gb of transfer at $10 or so, which is easily achievable.
Life shows us that more often than not, hosts who charge more per Gb of transfer provide a better service overall; the ratio of $1/GB of data transfer is often times considered as the point from where a host can make a profit without overselling.
The only possible (a more appropriate word would be “remote”) way of getting more out of a plan with unmetered bandwidth is to have a website that fits the restrictions and manages to consume high amounts of bandwidth while using low amounts of server resources.
My way
It won’t come as a surprise that I’m not pro unmetered bandwidth plans in their current form. If I were to choose between buying a plan that suits my website’s needs and one that comes unmetered bandwidth I would go for the one that fits my bandwidth requirements.
Sure, everyone can decide according to his own priorities or point of view, but for me unmetered bandwidth in shared hosting is not yet the revolution I was expecting. No, I’m not waiting for the ultimate budget hosting offer. I’m waiting for a change in the way server resources are sold.
http://www.whreviews.com