Cheap and reliable web hosting, you would think, is easily available with some simple searches in Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. – oh really?
I have used over a dozen different hosting companies for my web sites and blogs for over 5 years now, and I have been burned badly by some of them, and some of these companies are in the so-called “top ten”.
I have registered over 100 domain names, and hosted over 80 of them with various hosting companies with varying results. The cheapest servers claim to be reliable and have 99% up times just like the expensive hosting companies. Price has almost nothing to do with whether or not the server, box, machine, computer, or ISP is reliable.
Below I will tell you my experience with so-called cheap hosting companies and give you a few rules-of-thumb to keep in mind.
Cheap Hosting Does Not Mean Unreliable
I learned this the hard way initially in my business because I at first I assumed that if I spent the big bucks on a so-called superior Web hosting company I would have 100% up-time and 0% downtime. I assumed that the expensive hosting companies would also provide superior customer service – I was dead wrong.
What I have found is that smaller hosting companies built by smart IT technicians provide the best customer service and some of the most solid servers available to Webmasters and businesses alike.
The problem is you really don’t know which companies in which servers give you the most up-time, speed/bandwidth, billing customer service, solid database structures, and tech-support until you have actually use their services. It’s literally a trial and error situation which is really frustrating.
I could go on a rant that would last for 10,000 words or more just complaining about some of the Web hosting companies that I have dealt with over the past five years. I make my living from web sites (full-time living) and when they go down it is very costly for me. For example, just this last three months three of my web sites which average over 5,000 unique visitors a day have been going down almost daily for a small period of time. Well that small period of time and cost me hundreds of dollars in profit, and there is no way to recoup those losses from the hosting company that has failed to keep your web sites up.
Ironically, the company that I’m talking about (which I will leave nameless but I call them WSS – so if you’re an experienced Webmaster you will know exactly who I’m talking about) claimed to be inexpensive and reliable – they have cost me thousands of dollars in downtime over the last few years.
It has taken me many many hours of work to migrate web sites and blogs over to different hosting companies because of databases and scripts that I have to run. I wish that somebody would have written and article like this one so that I would have been better prepared to make a smarter choice what I signed up for hosting.
The issues I’m talking about above are just some of the issues I’ve had with inexpensive AND expensive hosting companies and that includes some of the biggest hosting companies on the planet. What they cost has almost nothing to do with their reliability.
Web Hosting Customer Service
Customer service became the most important factor for me when I choose to try a new hosting company – and I still try new companies regularly so that I can maybe find the best of the best. And like I have mentioned above not necessarily the cheapest of the cheapest.
When it comes to customer service the first thing I look for is a dedicated staff that uses a “live support” chat system so that their IT techs can help me 24/7/365. I have signed up for dedicated hosting (but almost always choose dedicated hosting instead of shared hosting) because the company had a live support chat system and after a year or so they discontinued their live chat support system or they only had it opened on regular business hours (9-5 Monday through Friday) and here is the rub;
It’s painful to have to migrate databases and your domains over to a new hosting company because of the fear that something might go wrong and you will lose your data or destroy your web site or blog. It is no big deal to migrate your database to a new server once you know how to do it, but if you include having to migrate nameservers (which often comes with downtime due two DNS propagation) migration is something most of us Webmasters and web site owners try to avoid. As a matter of fact, I have held off from migrating from they unreliable hosting company to a reliable hosting company for months because of this hassle.
My suggestion is not to signup with a hosting company out of a whim and deal with a trial and error approach. I would spend some time reading posts like this one so you can learn from people who have made mistakes and learn from them. As we speak I am getting ready to migrate three of my web sites (blogs) to a different hosting company and I am not that happy about it because it’s a waste of time when I could be writing or creating more web sites and making more profit.
What Do Reliable Hosting Companies Look Like?
From my experience to reliable what posting companies look a certain way. They need to be big enough to have redundancy technologies firmly in place and they need to have a healthy enough bottom line to make customer service and tech-support a high priority.
A small Web hosting company may not have enough profit and the cash to provide the above, while a big hosting company does not have enough staff to manage all of their servers 24 4/7/365 and enough staff to provide tech-support.
So what you are looking for in a reliable Web hosting company is one that is smart enough to avoid rapid growth which overextends their human resources and their hardware resources. You need a Web hosting company that is willing to slowly grow in the small steps in assuring the reliability other servers and the experience of their tech support team. Greed kills many a hosting company because they grow too fast and destroy their good reputations.
So Who Do I Recommend These Days
I have recommended some hosting companies to friends and family (and Clients/Associates) just to be wrong, embarrassed, and disappointed in myself for giving them a bum steer. I recommended one hosting company that I thought was solid and reliable and that had, what I thought was, a superior tech-support system, just to find out that in time they were bought out by new owners and everything tanked. They’re hosting servers were down frequently, their customer service was nonexistent, their phone was always busy, and they would never get back to you. Not to mention their servers were as slow as tractors.
I learned never to recommend any hosting company to anyone and less I have used their services for at least two or more years. I even look into the viability and the health of the particular Web hosting company so I don’t expect them to be bought out and disassembled into a complete catastrophe.
All of my new domains for the past three years have been hosted with Mocha Hosting and the reasons are very simple. Good customer support/tech-support system and reliable servers. Why? I don’t know – except to maybe assume they have a sound management structure in place with a high priority on reliability and tech-support.
The the reason I chose Mocha was because they had been ranked #1 for customer support for a long time now and I was just taking a gamble again – doing a trial and error test with them. I could only hope that their claims of being #1 for tech support were legitimate but it sees I finally made a lucky decision.
So before this starts sounding like a blanket endorsement of a particular hosting company and some sort of bogus Web hosting company review all leave it at that (in the end you will have to do exactly what I did and take a stab in the dark hoping for the best) I have to say that I still use six different hosting companies for my bank of web sites and blogs. Why? Because I need the best redundancy possible over my complete network of sites.
What if a web hosting company had a building that started on fire and Burt to the ground and they did not have their own in-house backup and redundancy system? I would be in trouble at all of my data and all of my content could be lost forever. My business would be destroyed and I would have to start all over again. This is why I always recommend that people who make a living online download the contents of their web sites and databases on regular basis and backup everything on an external drive of their own. This is a real – you could lose your whole business model.
I suppose it is one reason I chose Mocha as well because they have a redundancy and backup server system in place so in the case of a total catastrophe such as fire, flood, vandalism, or theft I would still have all of my database data.
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