Discount Hosting Providers

The Truth About "Discount" Hosting

There is a common misconception about the true cost of web hosting services.  Many hosting providers make claims of providing large or unlimited amounts for disk space, bandwidth, capacity, backups, and free software, all for the price of a Happy Meal each month.  You may be asking yourself, how can they make any money doing that?  Well, they can't.  These claims are a clever marketing ploy to get you to sign up.

Unlimited Disk Space & Bandwidth

Most web hosting accounts don't require that much disk space, or bandwidth, for that matter.  Discount hosting providers count on this.  But what happens if you actually need a large amount of disk space or your site gets more traffic?  They will simply shut your site down, demand more money for your overages, and negotiate a new contract with you, at a much higher price.

Remember, discount hosting providers rely on you to use a small fraction of their resources, so they oversell their capacity.  This means that they stack thousands of websites on the same server with your website, which slows down your website's performance and can render your website unusable at times.

How do we know all of this?  Well, it's all in their contract.  If you read the fine print (and sometimes you have to call them to get this information), they only provide you with what they determine to be "reasonable" usage, which is also entirely up to them to determine.  Sounds fishy, doesn't it?

Data Backups

If backing up your data is important to you, then you will be disappointed to learn that discount hosting providers don’t actually back up your data, much less your databases.  They may promise "data backups", but if you read the fine print, you'll notice that they only promise to back up their own server data, which is useless to you if their server crashes.

Free Software

Many web hosting providers offer "free" software with your web hosting account.  But what value are you getting?  You get a ton of disconnected software modules without warranty, with databases that don't talk to each other, all designed and developed by different programmers who are not available to support them.  You are left to configure and assemble this "free" software into a stable and reliable web management solution for your organization.  And who is going to fix bugs and upgrade the software? Your discount hosting provider is not.  It's all in their contract.  Not likely to help you sleep well at night.

In Summary

There are some very good hosting providers out there, so we are not trying to say that all of them are deceptive.  But we have been in the hosting business since the 1990s, and we have heard the horror stories from many customers that have come to us after being burned by discount hosting providers, so we don't want you to make the same mistake.

Remember, if it seems too good to be true - it probably is.