SECRET ONLINE STRATEGY #2
Finding an Affordable Webhosting Company
Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised at some of what I’ve experienced even with top rated reputable webhosting companies.
Who do you trust with your confidential information that you publish on the internet?
You need to make a decision based upon your own experience and level of involvement in your sites.
However, to help gain insight, I’ll tell you about my experiences with several webhosts over the last few years since I put my first website online several years ago.
When I first got started online I used a company called RegisterFly for both hosting and domain names, I refuse to link to them because my experience was absolutely terrible. If you go to their site right now you will see a big ugly message stating some trouble they got into with ICANN. The ICANN is the entity in charge of domain registrations worldwide.
Besides absolutely terrible customer service or lack thereof all together, Registerfly overcharged my account and it took, as I recall, close to 10 messages just to have my account refunded. It just goes to show that even a good looking website can be a poorly managed company, or worse, a total scam.
I had signed up for notices everytime I logged into my account. For some reason I began getting notices that my account was being accessed, and at the time it wasn’t by me. This occured several times.
Registerfly.com has had a plethora of complaints as I found out after I began to experience problems myself. My word of caution is to stay away from them at all costs and move your domain names as soon as possible to a more reliable name registrar.
My second experience in webhosts was with a private individual who had rented his own server and was renting out excess space. Nice Guy and all, but the server went down a couple times and I was left without a website for 2 days at 1 time and roughly 1 day another time. Despite this issue I let it slide until I could not get an important issue resolved. It never did get resolved which is why I had to change hosts once again.
Next was the ever-popular Godaddy…
For a simple Family website Godaddy should work fine.
They have cheap services and outstanding support from my experience. There are a few problems I had though.
1. Such as their control panel which doesn’t offer nearly as many options as Cpanel, one of the most popular user control panels.
2. Their shared server hosting doesn’t offer CRON jobs a requirement for some social network and affiliate program softwares.
3. I’ve heard reports of them taking control of domain names for certain types of SPAM complaints. Even if you aren’t involved in SPAM, which you shouldn’t be, sometimes even opt-in subscribers, will report SPAM, either intentionally or by accident, rather than unsubscribe. It’s almost unavoidable if you generate massive traffic. And of course that’s the idea if you run a business.
From the word on the street, this “domain control clause” is in their Terms of Service. I’d suggest reading it yourself if your curious. I’d like to mention that this never happened to me. In this case I’m simply reporting, but personally I don’t want to take the chance. I am in the process of moving my names and files to a new host and registrar.
That brings me to the next webhost and domain name registrar, which I actually recommend based on both my experience and recommendations from other users.
I’ve switched to using NameCheap.com for my domain name registrations. As the name says they are cheap and they have an easy to use web interface. I now use Media Temple for my webhosting services. So far they’ve proven reliable and have many additional features and tools to help market your business. They have a built in Stats system called Urchin which is the same stats system used by Google.
If you are in business, no matter how boring you think analyzing stats is, it remains to be the only way you can measure progress and improvement.
So there you have it.
There are a ton of variables involved in selecting a reliable webhost.
In my opinion the 2 services to use are…
- Media Temple for Web Hosting - Right Now you can sign up for monthly service for just $20 which is well worth it for what you get.
- NameCheap.com for domain names
