Most web site hosting companies offer a free 30 day trial so that you can see if their hosting package is right for you. During this time, you get the full benefit of using your hosting plan, but with the promise of a full refund if you are not completely satisfied with the services. Essentially, this is a ‘tire-kicking’ period where you can see if all of the hosting features work for the site that you plan to build before you obligate yourself to a one or two year contract. This is definitely a time to thoroughly test drive the hosting company’s services, but in this case, time is not on your side. Realistically, if you think about it, most people don’t get their site up and fully running during this trial period, and don’t encounter any real problems until about three months later, when it is too late to cancel the contract.
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If you only have the opportunity to work on your site part-time, that 30 days goes by quickly. In fact, if you design your own site, you might not have it fully operational in thirty days. Even if you work on your site full time, it might not be possible to get enough traffic to your site in time to see what failures aren’t correctable with a particular low budget hosting company in time to take advantage of the cancelation period. If you look in chat rooms, most complaints with hosting companies surface around 3-6 months into the contract and arise from promises made by hosting companies that simply weren’t true. Here are some of the more common problems and how to avoid them them:
99.9% Uptime:
Every web site hosting company promises it, but do they deliver? You can’t really tell in 30 days, and if you read the fine print in your contract, you can’t cancel it after the trial period because of excessive server downtime. You may get a prorated credit for the time the server is down, and that is the end of it. Instead of being impressed by the brand name of the servers, ask customer service how old the servers are and how many servers the company has compared to the number of customers they supply. Old and overloaded servers are your first clue that there will be substantial downtime. Ask if they lease or own their data center. If the data center is leased, you will have to do a separate check on it. This is because a leased data center means that your hosting company has no control over its upkeep. Also, beware of small, private web site hosting companies with their own equipment, because there is no way to evaluate it.
Unlimited Email Accounts:
This one in particular gets a lot of complaints. You may get unlimited or quite a few email accounts, but you only get so much storage for emails and you only get to receive so many. With some hosting companies, this is actually a disk storage and bandwidth issue; whereby if you have no disk storage or monthly bandwidth left, you simply get no more emails for the month. Clarify this one with customer service before you give them a credit card.
Unlimited Disk Space and Bandwidth:
This one gets a lot of complaints from rookie web masters. This is because when a cheap web hosting company offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth, they really mean that you can have about 1,500 gigabytes of disk storage and 15,000 gigabytes of bandwidth per month (which is actually a large amount of space and bandwidth, but still not considered “unlimited”). Unless you ask, they won’t tell you that this is based on the capacity that they figure the average user will probably never exceed.
FrontPage and Dreamweaver Compatible:
A budget web hosting company may offer FrontPage hosting and Dreamweaver extensions, but if they operate on a Linux platform, they may not have worked out all of the kinks. Also, as with any other third party software, don’t be surprised if their operating system is only compatible with older software versions and not the newer ones. Remember, it takes a lot of time and money to keep an operating system current. If you have third party software, get it in writing that your version is supported by your hosting company’s current operating system.
Customer Service is 24/7:
Your low cost web hosting company’s mailing address may be in Maine, but their customer service department could be in another country. If it is, they have no access to the data center and don’t even actually work for your hosting company. Expect slow service if you get any at all. Make sure to ask if the customer service department is outsourced before you sign a contract.
Accepts all Credit Cards:
Credit card data must be managed in accordance with the PCI (Payment Card Industry) DSS mandate issued by VISA (aka CISP). If your hosting company currently doesn’t have this in place, don’t even try accepting credit cards, because if one of your customer’s credit information gets stolen from unsecured servers in a data center, you may be held liable for any damages as a result of identity theft. If you don’t see confirmation of a current PCI standing on your web site hosting company’s home page, proceed with caution.
Unfortunately, these aren’t extreme cases when it comes to web site hosting companies that don’t deliver all that they promise. The best thing to do is ask a lot of questions before you go through that thirty day trial period. However, don’t worry about finding the right company. If your first choice doesn’t work out, there are plenty of other hosting companies out there.
