Good Deal?? $10 a month web hosting or less?

There are numerous web hosts out there advertising web hosting services for $5 or $10 a month. Let's take this price and put it into perspective:

Is $10 a month web hosting (or less) a good deal?

Well naturally, it depends on the web hosting company. So how do you choose one?

1) The web host that offers the most features for that price?

2) The web host with the most professional website design?

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Most people will do exactly that -- if the website hosting company has a real professional website that looks good, that could be a major selling point for them.

But the question is -- why?

Let me put it another way. If you were going out to eat dinner with family, and were going to visit a restaurant, would you pick one based on how nice the yellow page ad was?

Or is the quality of the food and portion size completely a separate issue than how their advertisement looks?

We've all seen it before. A great looking advertisement, a nice looking restaurant, you go in and eat, and it's not nearly the quality of food you were expecting -- often much worse.

Yet we've all seen the old little mom & pop home cooked restaurants that have been there for many years, and the restaurant is always full.

Truthfully, product quality has usually no bearing on advertising or marketing quality.

Similarily:

Great looking websites for web hosting companies usually have no bearing on the quality of service you'll receive. Perhaps they are just web host that has spent a huge amount of money, time, and resources to building a great marketing plan..

But the actual back end web servers are lacking. How do you lay trust to the professional marketing, but shoddy hosting service that you'll discover after its too late?

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The answer?

Do RESEARCH on any prospective web hosting company. There is plenty of things you can do.. For instance:

1) Send their tech support an email, or open a trouble ticket, and ask some questions. Do you get a canned cut/paste reply? How soon does a real person respond to you?

2) Call their 1-800# (and they should have a 1-800#) and try to speak to someone in technical support. Ask them what their uptime or reliability is -- or how many servers they have.

If they say we have "4" servers, perhaps they are too tiny. If they say we have "500 servers" perhaps they are too large and you get lost in the shuffle.

Find out what other people have to say about the web host. Do some searches with terms like "example.com sucks" (where example.com is the domain name of the prospective web host you are searching"

Or search things like "cancelled my account example.com" or "hosting problem example.com"

Here you'll find all kinds of blogs and other review sites where someone has critiqued the web host you are researching.

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Never let flashy professional websites sway your decision on which web host seems to offer the best features, price, and especially quality of service.

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Above all, here's a very good logical point:

The web hosting companies that CHARGE MORE, generally do it, because they are WORTH MORE.

A TV dinner bought at the grocery store for $1.49 probably doesn't taste as good as a meal at a restaurant for $8.49.. There is good reason why QUALITY costs more.

So avoid these cheap deals! They are nothing more than marketing ploys to gain as many customers as they can, while giving the cheapest quality service that they can for that price.

(really, that's the only way for a cheap web host to make a profit -- offer a cheap price, and offer a cheap service behind it)

Similarily, a dollar store, that sells products for $1.00 are always lower quality cheap products than those that cost $5.00 at a regular department store.

Why trust your business website and email services to a web hosting company who has a business plan akin to a dollar store?

It's all common sense. Yet web hosting customers forget the basic principles of business and marketing while they shop. Be careful out there.

Does the location of your website matter?

It is easy on the internet to find a web hosting company. However, many people neglect to actually find out where the web host is located.

What city, province, state, or even COUNTRY is the web host's headquarters in?

There is a variety of reasons why you should find out. First, and fore most, if they do not have a toll free 1-800#, you may be footing an expensive bill for tech support.

In addition, what under what law is your terms of agreement written under? If you have to take the web hosting company to court, where would you have to file?

If the web host is in a different country (ie: You're Canadian and the web hosting company is in the USA) do governmental protection agencies protect you? Usually government agencies only protect the citizens of the country that they are in... So if you need help with a web host who is acting inappropriately, you might be left without..

Before signing up with any web hosting company, find out where they are located. Have a telephone conversation with them, to see if you're speaking to someone who actually speaks english well. Sometimes web hosts overseas have a U.S. phone number and mailing address, which is relatively easy to get.

However you may be speaking to someone over a VoIP connection, in India, or some other place, who is difficult to understand, or where the telephone connection is unreliable.

Always check the location of your web host, you'll thank yourself later.

Web Hosting: Control Panels -- cpanel the best?

There are web designers out there who are so familiar with "cpanel" that whenever they work with a new client, if a cpanel control panel isn't available, they quickly become uncomfortable.

YES, cpanel is the most common control panel software out there.

NO, cpanel is not the best choice, and I'll explain why.

If every single web hosting company out there used cpanel, we'd all be locked into a monopoly of server control panels.

Some people would say "so?"

Well here's the catch. If an exploit exists, where cpanel had a bug, all of a sudden every website out there could fall victim to this problem until the control panel was fixed.

Black hat hackers / crackers sharing the same shared hosting server that you are on, would all of a sudden "own" the server, be able to exploit back doors into the system, and control the web hosts' equipment.

I recently met a web host who ran their own custom control panel. It did not look anything like the standardized (even privately labelled) cpanel that we are all use to...

I asked that host "why don't you run cpanel".. I was impressed by their answer.

"Quite simply, when something goes wrong with our control panel, we are the software authors, and it is our code. We do not depend on a 3rd party to have something fixed. Therefore we can react quickly since it is our own code. Furthermore, if a security condition exists with cpanel that is advertised, we do not fall victim to it. We believe that having our own custom control panel is the way to go, and it protects our clients, and keeps us dynamic in the way we can respond to our customer issues faster than the "standard host" who runs the standard cpanel."

Seemed like an intelligent answer to me.

Like most of you, I hate monopolies. So if cpanel has cornered the web hosting control panel market, having a host who DOES NOT run cpanel seems like quite an advantage to me.

When it comes to web hosting companies, so many of them are similar. It is little things like this -- the selection of which control panel software they use that can be the differentiating factor.. even a selling point on who I would trust my website with...

Web Designers & Web Hosting DO NOT MIX

There are very talented and graphically inclined web designers out there.

At the same time, there is very talented, and effective SEO / Search Engine Optimizers out there. (to give the most visits to your site)

...and finally, there is very talented and skilled Web Hosting companies out there, who will concentrate on uptime and functionality to keep your website operating on the web 100%, and your email working morning till night, everyday.

HERE'S THE CATCH

Watchout for the talented and graphically inclined web designer who tries to sell you not only graphic work (and redesign of your website), but also SEO and Hosting services all in the same bundle.

Many of these web designers figure that if you are asking for their services in the first place, you do not know much about SEO.. and furthermore, you surely do not know much about web hosting, the costs, the relability, or more.

One web designer (who did great work btw)... told me once:

I can sell a client on a $500 to $1500 website redesign pretty quickly. But whats weird is, that they trust me 100% with SEO (search engine optimization) ...

AND

If I want, I can get this client to host their website with the web hosting company of their choice. Which simply means, not only will I charge them for their design work.. but.. I will also be able to let them to put my website on whatever server the web designer feels comfortable with...

THE REAL TRUTH IS:

Many web designers get a "kick back" or "commission" or "discount" when they host multiple clients at a certain web host. So their interest in having you move your website to another host, is more of a financial reason for themselves, RATHER THAN your best interest at heart.

BE VERY WARY OF:

The web designer who plays with your site for a couple weeks, and then comes to you and says "Yea, your current web host sucks. I've tried to work with them. It would be so much better for me (and your bottom dollar) if you cancel everything and move to my own web host. "

So be careful out there.

Directories, and paid listings

Watch out for directories who are offering you the opportunity to advertise your business on their 411 directory website for only $400 a year.

The thing is.. there are plenty of 411 directories. Some of them are official, some of them are nothing more than a website that someone made in a month, shoved a bunch of free listings on it, and now they run around looking for suckers to pony up $400 for a paid "enhanced" listing.

These directories are similar to those unregulated online casinos. Who is watching them? How can they prove how much exposure your listing will receive in a given week or month?

No.. the sole purpose of many of these online 411 directories is to do nothing more than find business that is ready to hand over $400 a year without paying attention to the real meaning of their ROI (return on investment).

So if you get one of these "cold calls" in the middle of your business day. Someone offering you the chance to write a cheque, and get a enhanced text listing in their directory...

Ask questions. Ask a lot of questions. See how easy it is to find this 411 directory.

Don't get duped by a sales pitch with no guarantees, no promise of exposure, and no promise of returns -- the point is, that they are out to take your money.

Be careful out there!

The internet is still the wild-wild-west.

Website Templates: Good & Bad

If you aren't graphically inclined, you may be tempted to use a website template. They are produced by people who have a graphical nack for illustration, drawing, and desktop publishing.

Here's the pros: For cheap (usually under $200) you can buy a graphic template, and plug your information into it. Often for an additional $300 or $400 you can ask the template shop to customize it for you. So if its about money, its a good bang for your buck.

The cons though, can outweigh it though.

Your template may have been sold to a few hundred other people too. If someone spots a similar website design out there, it could be embarassing for your business. Not only that, but often these templates are not fully SEO friendly.

Often website templates may not include certain things. For instance, I bought one with a flash animation. But the "form fields" in the flash code did not contain the actual programming (named Actionscript), for the form to work. In the fine print of the terms/conditions, it mentioned that Actionscript code was not included as part of the template.

I had to run around to www.guru.com and find an ActionScript programmer, and hired one overseas to "complete" my template.

It was not a pleasurable experience for me. The next time I think about using a ready made template, I'll think twice.

It's always better to find an out of work webdesigner in your local area, who has talent, and can show you the work they've done. Be very careful to only pay 1/2 of the design fee prior to the project beginning, and leave the remainder of the fee to be paid upon completion. ALWAYS, always, always... have a written contract before you work with any web designer as well.

Finally, choose your web hosting company yourself. Often the ones that web designers recommend, they do so, based on "kick backs" the web host gives them for referred business. Often the web designer is interest in their referral commission, and does not really care about the reliability of the web host. Be forewarned.

Good luck.

Everyone has friends that say "I'll host your website for you"

More and more these days, people are finding friends who say "hey, I know where you can put your website for cheap"

Now if the same friends said:

"Hey, cancel your phone line. I know where you can get a phone line for cheap"

All of a sudden (because telephones are huge to all of us), we'd go "uhh, wait a minute"

So why is it any different when someone offers us a deal for our website? Is a website not important? Is a business website not a part of our business?

"What's that you tell me? Instead of paying $20 a month, I can pay $7?"

Well $13 savings seems to be the winner. Until.........

NO YOU CAN'T GET YOUR EMAIL. NO YOU CAN'T REACH SOMEONE ON THE PHONE. NO YOUR WEBSITE IS DOWN. NO EVERYTHING IS RUNNING CRAZY.

So yeah, you save $7 a month, and spend 2 hours of your time each month trying to get answers to your problems.

The whole internet industry has taken a turn for the "cheap". At the cost of saving business $7/month but possibly losing yourself hundreds each month.

If you have a business website, and your website and business is important to you, let me tell you this... $20 every 30 days is not a BIG DEAL. We're talking less than a $1/day. So don't be sold on cutting your hosting costs in half.

If you have a reputable hosting company, who has strong servers, is there when you call. Can help you send/receive email when its important. Then how important is $7 savings every month?

We can blow $7 on coffee at starbucks.

People, please wake up and stop looking at pennies, and look at the real picture.

...and the way I'll end this is... that's my 2 cents. :)