Budget web hosting companies all offer a free 30 day money back guarantee policy if you don’t like their services, so when you go to a chat room and you see so much outrage at cheap hosting companies where this didn’t work out you have to wonder, “What happened?” Are these hosting companies such shysters that they are ripping people off for the $6.95 that someone paid in good faith, or are these people who are complaining crazy? The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but here’s what you need to do so that the same thing doesn’t happen to you.
- First off, plan your site out ahead of time. Work out how much disk space and bandwidth you need before you buy a plan. If you exceed near the plan allotment, your site won’t load. As well if you plan to have a high traffic sight, you are going to need more bandwidth. Also, plan for the way your site is going to grow. If your site outgrows the disk space 6 months into the contract and you can’t use the plan, you don’t get your money back. Some companies will let you trade up to a virtual or dedicated server if they have the space, but some companies only offer shared hosting. Trust anyone who says they did not get their money back because they complained about not having enough space on an unlimited plan. Read the contract. Even unlimited plans have limits.
- Try out any software that you want to use with the hosting company within the first two weeks. The key here is to cancel the contract before the thirty days is up if your software doesn’t work with the hosting company. If you try to use software 45 or 60 days into your contract and you can’t get it to work, you can try customer service for help. However, if you can’t get third party software to work with your site, even if it is supported by extensions, you won’t get your money back. You can get as upset as you want, but if you read your contract it will state that your budget web hosting company isn’t responsible for any third party software even if they claim they support it in their advertising. You have to either pay more for a package that already has the software included, like PHP, or pay for a Windows hosting environment, as should do with FrontPage 2003 web hosting.
- Don’t count on getting unlimited emails, either. Yes, cheap web hosting companies say that you can get unlimited emails in the advertising as well, but this has a limit too. In order to find this out, you have to find out how much email storage you have, and how many emails you can get in a certain time period. Some companies are sneaky in the way that not only do they limit the amount of emails you can get in a month; they also limit it to a 24 hour period as well. Not getting your emails is also not a reason to cancel your contract and get your money back.
Also, just because you don’t get that 99.9% uptime that you were promised is also not a reason to get a refund. The only thing that a budget web hosting company will do in this case is to give you a credit on your next month for the time that the server was down. It doesn’t matter that you don’t want more of the same poor service at a cheaper rate, you’re going to get it anyway and you will pay for it.
But wait, there’s more. If you sign up for a shared hosting plan, you never know who might be sharing your server space with you. There are many horror stories of out of control coding that messes up the whole server and also of people stealing code from other sites on the same server. There are all kinds of tricks that fellow web developers can play, which is why you should never have information stored on a shared server that you don’t want the whole world to have access to.
You can now understand why people get so upset if any of the aforementioned has happened to them. Most people take their web sites seriously, even if they do sign up for budget web hosting. These examples of what can happen are definitely the extreme. But if you think that your low cost web hosting company is suspect for any of this kind of activity, the free 30 day trial is the time to get your money back and go to another hosting company. This is the time to be absolutely cautious. Most of the bad stories you will hear from angry people are from subscribers who were 3 to 6 month into their contract. They had put a lot of effort and time into their site only to find out that the hosting company they chose just wasn’t right for them. They may be exaggerating, who knows? But they are right on one point. After the thirty days is up, don’t expect a refund.
