Hosting Pitfalls In your search for webhosting you will be enticed with all sorts of special offers and unbelievable deals. That is precisely what they are - 'unbelievable'. Be wary of these deals because they might sound good now but they will come back to haunt you in the future. There are lots of different tricks that hosting companies use to entice new blood. Dont be fooled by these tricks. There is an old saying that you get what you pay for. This applies 100% to webhosting. 1. Unlimited Packages The idea of being able to host as many pages and images as you wish really sounds appealing at first especially when it is only costing you between £10 - £20 each month. Dont let yourself get pulled into believing this. Servers cost money - servers are just bigger, better versions of a home PC (In most cases anyway). They have harddrives just like your PC and you know your pc doesnt have unlimited storage space. Hosts offering unlimited packages began when hosting became a competitive market and someone had the bright idea of making this offer to get an edge on the more respectable competition. We know the pitfalls off offering unlimited packages. We did this ourselves in the beginning and soon realised it was a bad move when it cost us a lot of money and a large number of unhappy customers. We have now changed our operating ways and fell in line with the rest of the main hosting companies. We want to ensure our customers are happy. When you are happy, we are happy. 2. Huge Plans At Ultra-Cheap Prices When you see hosting that is at unbelievably low prices (£2 or £3 for something that other larger hosts are selling for £10 - £20 you can be sure that your website will be down more often than up. These hosts are doing one of two things or maybe even both. They are running extremely cheap and unreliable servers meaning they can sell their plans that much cheaper or they are flooding each server with that many accounts that the server will soon struggle to perform (Same as your PC when the harddrive starts to fill). Steer clear of these hosts. They are not interested in you the customer but would rather line their pocket with quick easy money. Our packages are prices competitively yet we keep them as low as possible. As some would put it we are on the low side of the logical pricing for resources. Our aim is not to get rich quick but instead offer the client more value for money on extremely reliable servers. We use only Top End servers from one of the worlds leading server providers (The Planet). 3. Free Domain Names Some hosts entice their customers with offers of free domain names. This is perfectly fine practise but be sure that you are the named owner of the domain name. Most hosting companies only lease you access to the domain you want. This is fine while you remain with their hosting company. The problems start to arise when you decide to move to a new host. If your name is not the registered name for the domain you dont have any rights to use the domain elsewhere. At the least be sure that your name is registered as the domain owner. On some off our services we give away free domains but we state clearly at all times the terms on which these domains are given freely. We always put the customers name as the registered owner however. 4. Set Up Fees Never agree to pay any set up fees on any shared hosting or reseller hosting packages. It doesnt cost the hosting company anything to set up your account and in most cases everything is automated by the billing system being used. For dedicated servers there are set up fees as the server has to be set up and the software etc installed on it just like a PC. The majority of hosting companies wont charge you any set up fees even for dedicated servers. We pride ourselves in never charging any setup fees. 5. Free Hosting Hosting is never free. The hosting company have to generate the money somehow to cover the cost of the servers. The way in which the do this is to place their advertising on your site. Can you imagine working hard or paying lots of money to a professional to build your website only to have it ruined by ads that look very out of place. 6. Support Always make sure that the host has a competent support team. There are many hosting companies that have set up but never thought about what happens when something goes wrong. In this situation the customer is left with a site that doesnt work and the hosting company usually end up going under. Before committing to a hosting company, test their support area. Dont always rely upon fast response time only. Ask a technical question and see what type of reply you get. A really good hosting company wont mind replying in detail to a potential customer.