Large Web Hosting / Cheap Prices: THE CATCH

Are you consider using a very large web hosting company? They probably run into the exact same problems that most large web hosts do.. Do a Google search for "[companyname] sucks" where [companyname] is the name of the large web host. Read every single link that appears in the results. It will become quite clear to you what silly things they have done.

I've seen it hundreds of times. Customers look at price and features and figure their decision is done. Anyone offering a particular feature set for a particular price must be the best.

If I invited you and your family out for dinner, and I told you that I'd be serving a four course meal for only 17 cents per person, wouldn't that cause you to stop and think and say "oh wait a minute, whats the catch?"

Here's whats going on in the web hosting industry today, and you can find out more things by going to http://sillyinternet.blogspot.com

These are the possible catches that by the time you find them out, it's too late.

1. Many of these super cheap deals are with very large web hosts. Similarily you can buy a cheeseburger for 99 cents at a McDonalds, and you pay $3.99 at a regular restaurant. You decide which quality is better.

2. A large web host corporation will have multiple tiers of support. In addition, you are likely to speak to different people everytime you have problems with your account over the course of a year. Which means you might find yourself re-explaining yourself, or referring to yourself as a ticket #, issued on a ticket date. They might refer to a resolution #, and ask you to submit your request by a form.

3. The larger the organization, usually the larger the problem when things do go wrong. For instance, they might have a team of 10 system administrators, but those 10 system administrators manage 500 servers. When things go nuts, that’s 1 person to handle 50 machines, and that’s why downtime will be more plentiful.

4. A smaller "mid-range" web hosting company will give you more personalized service and fight for your business.

5. In my experience, of all customers who leave a web host for cheaper prices, a nice majority of them up returning within 1 to 3 years after being mistreated elsewhere.

6. For business websites, at some point you must decide: Is your online marketing goal to pay the cheapest hosting service you can find, or is it to grow your online business to make money so that your $20 to $30/month hosting fees are the last thing on your mind as you watch your bank account grow from online sales?

7. In my opinion and from what I've seen, cheap hosts under $7 or $8 a month generally have a wholesale cost of $3 per hosting customer a month that goes into accounting, marketing, and support costs. This means that your $4.95/account is actually $1.95/month profit. The way the host makes money is that they need tens of thousands of customers.

Now here's the thing, when you need something out of the norm, or your particular account isn't working and they do not move fast enough to help you... They are looking at you like you’re a $2 a month profit walking around complaining. When you threaten to leave, they act concerned but really on the other end of the phone they are smiling or laughing at how important you think you are... They would rather play the numbers game. 100 people join, 5 people are dissatisfied with something, who cares, let those 5 people cancel. They only represent $10/month of profit anyway. What they really want is the 95 people who stay and earn them $190/month of profit.

As web hosting customers, everyone thinks that price and features is the only things that count. The situation is much larger then that, and when your email goes down, or your website has trouble, or weird charges appear on your invoice when your website starts getting busy... You'll soon learn that maybe you're "married" to the wrong web hosting company, and in a panic you start searching for a solution. Why put yourself in this situation in the first place?

Cheap hosts don't hurt a quality web hosts business. The silly mistakes cheap hosts do long term is what grows the the customer base of a quality web host.

Cheap service vs Quality service, you decide.