The article is based on the findings and observations from the year 2011, where people have faced pitfalls due to deceptive offers from the hosting companies. In this article you would be learning about the gimmicks and ways to avoid falling prey to false promises.
We've read this many times and at multiple places,
yet the importance of finding a good web hosting providers still remains the primary requirements of any online business. It acts as the foundation of any website, business or brand over the world wide web. With the constant evolution of search engine algorithms, any downtime can pose potentially harm to your existence over the search engine rankings. All the efforts you've taken to get your business to a certain level can be washed due to constant down-times and delayed responses of your website hosted on a sloppy server. Hence, it becomes vital to host your site on a reliable and fast server offered by a professional hosting provider.
I know, making a right choice among loads of different service providers could be a tricky business. Especially when most of them offer various tempting promotions freebies. If you are the one who is in search of hosting, there are certain aspects that you need to be careful about. This article is all about the pitfalls that you may avoid, it's a study which I've tried to put forth based on the promotions and offering in the last year.
The following aspects should help you to be a smarter with choosing just the right host for your hosting requirements.
The Tempting offer of "Free Domain for Life" Majority of the individuals looking forward to debuting an online existence would usually find it tempting to get a free domain for life, however, there is something that you need to be aware about before you choose to sign-up for a deal:
Domain Ownership - No matter if a domain is offered for free, it is important that you check with the host about its ownership. It's been observed that it is used as one of the sources to increase customer-base, few hosts have been observed to keep the ownership to themselves. It means tomorrow for any reasons you intend to switch to a different provider, you wouldn't be able to do so, you'd be stuck with the hosting provider OR they'd ask you to pay a massive charge for transferring the domain to you. So, before you fall prey to such tricks, make sure that the domain ownership would handed-over to you.
Domain Registration Charges Waived Off - It was a common scenario amongst hosting providers to offer such a deal, but not many people knew that the costs were covered when customers were to renew the domain. A number of hosts charges an approximate of double the renewal charges. So make sure that this isn't the case with the host that you are looking forward to choosing.
Carry out a thorough research before choosing, ask questions, seek help from experts in the niche, take advice from friends before deciding a company to host your website.
Keeping the Domain Registrar and Website Hosting with Different Providers - The look-out for one-stop solutions can usually land you up into problems in future. Not many might be aware that you essentially don't need to have both the services with the same provider. Though if you know about a company who've been into the business for a longtime and are reputed to offer reliable services you may choose to do so, but if you aren't too sure about its dependability and trust, it's better to keep the two affairs separate. Though I do agree that it is usually convenient and easier to manage the domain and hosting if you have it with the same provider, but under certain circumstances if the host decides to take down his business, there is no way to recover your domain-name. You might choose a different host though and get your site uploaded on their server but unless you have access to the domain control panel, you'd neither be able to point it to the new server nor switch to a different registrar.
Terms and Conditions associated with the Server Resources - It was observed that the individuals who were looking for a basic package often overlooked the resources that we offered with the package considering that their site was new and the traffic flow wouldn't be much. Few realized that the site went unresponsive during the mid-cycle as the site gained an unexpected popularity by then. Though at the same time it was seen that not many faced such a scenario, but the point is to check the server resources and the terms associated with upgrading the current servers if you reach near the allocated resources. So, as a precautionary measure it is always better to choose a package that offers resources that are just above than the actual website requirements, this can help you balance a sudden spike.
The Gimmick of "Unlimited" - It was a surprise to see companies promoting themselves to be offering Unlimited resources with the packages they offered. It was even more surprising to see that people were actually getting attracted to such offers. This is a clear indication to the fact that people still don't want to believe that there isn't anything called as Unlimited in the Industry of hosting. It's just a marketing gimmick used by hosting providers to attract people. If you take a look at the TOS page of such a company, you'd notice somewhere there'd be an explanation about CPU or Server Usage, where things are put in a different manner which isn't easily understandable to a layman, which says "If a site exceeds a certain amount of resources it'd be considered as a violation which can result in ban or suspension of an account", that is something which you'd least expect in an Unlimited package right?
So, make sure that you read the TOS. thoroughly and help yourselves from being fooled.
Doing in-depth Research about a Host - One of the best ways to check for the dependability of a hosting company is to search them using search engines, there you'd find a number of website referring to the company. You may check through those and draw a conclusion about their reputation, though not to mention that this may be an addition to the traditional techniques of finding a reliable host.
At the same time, you musn't forget the fact that the larger a company the greater would be the number of negative reviews as people find it easier to rant that to praise. So, don't come to a decision by only looking at the reviews on a particular site, but rather look at different places.
Discount Coupon Codes - Especially in the web hosting business, you can try looking for any discount coupons available over the web, in order to cut competition companies usually offer discount coupon codes for different packages. You may use it as an opportunity to get a package at a fairly discounted price.
Web-site BackUp - Well, backups is another biggest overlooked factor over the Internet today. People often tend to rely on the backups secured by the hosting provider. They are probably unaware of the fact that these backups are either taken weekly or may be daily, but are of incremental nature. So, if you haven't visited your website since more than a week and during this period if its got hacked, the tool would backup whatever is there on the site, it doesn't know if its done by you or someone else unethically.
So, in order to avoid such a situation, it is recommended to maintain the latest backup on your local machine, rather when you make some changes to your site you can back it up manually.
If you intend to have a smooth online presence, I would suggest you to get into such minute detailing and help your website climb the ladder of success.
