How Important Is Choosing the Right Web Hosting Company?
David Oleszczuk asked:
Do you think any old web hosting company will do? They are all the same anyway, right? That was my philosophy. The cheaper I could get the hosting the better. I found one that had hosting starting at $0.99 per month. Hey, that was the one for me!. So I signed up. That was six years ago. I uploaded my site and everything worked well. Their uptime was good. In the six years, I think the site was only down for a few hours on a couple of different occasions. All was well, so I thought. My site continued to grow and evolve over the years, it was a public school district web site and it ended up being used heavily by the community for the events calendar, announcements, contacting teachers etc.. It ended up being several hundred pages.
Recently I got a phone call from our elementary school secretary. She told me that she could not access the website. I checked it out, and sure enough it was down. Well, I thought, it will probably be up in an hour or so. It is never down more that a couple or hours. Two hours passed, no web site. I decided to email their tech. support department. I sent an email telling them of the problem. Another two hours passed, no web site. I decided to email them again, this time I directed it to the sales department. Yet another two hours passed, no web site and no email response. I emailed the tech. support department again and marked it urgent. Again, no response and no website.
With that I decided to do some checking in hosting forums to see what some of the comments were about this hosting company. Something I should have done before I had chosen them. What an eye opener. they had about as low a rating as you could give for customer support and they didn’t rate much better in any of the other areas. One fellow said that he had been promoting his web site heavily and as soon as he started to get decent traffic to his site, they simple shut it off. He said that if he had lived in the U.S. he definitely would have sued. Another said that they also shut his site off for no reason and would not respond to his emails. Well needless to say, I started to panic, primarily due to the fact that I had just completed a major overhaul of my site and did not yet have a backup of the current site. Visions of many late nights of working feverishly to rebuild everything raced through my head. Just then the site was back up, fully functioning, just as though nothing happened. I was certainly relieved but not to happy about the lack of information or response from the hosting company.
The next morning I opened my email to find a response, finally, from my soon to be ex-hosting company. They basically reamed me out for have sent three emails about the problem. They went on to tell me how “people like me” cause web hosting costs to increase because I force them to read through duplicate emails, wasting their precious time. I managed to hold my composure long enough to reply, telling them that part of customer service is keeping the customer informed and that had they responded to the first email they wouldn’t have received the other two. I received a reply from their sales department that stunned me. It was an email explaining that if I didn’t like their customer support that I should go with a different company and listed the steps I should follow to terminate my account with them.
That did it! I had enough! I began searching for a web hosting company that was rated very highly in dependability and customer service. I began thinking about someone who had a web site which provided their primary source of income. Suppose that site went down without explanation! Or maybe, you have an ad-sense site that you have worked on for years to get to the point where it has significant enough traffic to generate decent revenue. It takes too long to build a website and get traffic to that site to trust it to some cheap hosting company that doesn’t give a flying fig about you, your business or your website. When all was said and done, the new hosting company cost me one dollar a month more and actually has a phone number you can call and speak with a real person in customer support.
In conclusion, the decision of which company to choose for your web-hosting is far more important than I ever realized. Choose a company based on customer reviews and legitimate un-biased hosting review sites. Never go with a hosting company that does not provide a phone number you can call for customer support. Price is certainly important but a few dollars a month is not worth the risk of losing your site, reputation or revenue. Last but not least, backup, backup and backup.
Do you think any old web hosting company will do? They are all the same anyway, right? That was my philosophy. The cheaper I could get the hosting the better. I found one that had hosting starting at $0.99 per month. Hey, that was the one for me!. So I signed up. That was six years ago. I uploaded my site and everything worked well. Their uptime was good. In the six years, I think the site was only down for a few hours on a couple of different occasions. All was well, so I thought. My site continued to grow and evolve over the years, it was a public school district web site and it ended up being used heavily by the community for the events calendar, announcements, contacting teachers etc.. It ended up being several hundred pages.
Recently I got a phone call from our elementary school secretary. She told me that she could not access the website. I checked it out, and sure enough it was down. Well, I thought, it will probably be up in an hour or so. It is never down more that a couple or hours. Two hours passed, no web site. I decided to email their tech. support department. I sent an email telling them of the problem. Another two hours passed, no web site. I decided to email them again, this time I directed it to the sales department. Yet another two hours passed, no web site and no email response. I emailed the tech. support department again and marked it urgent. Again, no response and no website.
With that I decided to do some checking in hosting forums to see what some of the comments were about this hosting company. Something I should have done before I had chosen them. What an eye opener. they had about as low a rating as you could give for customer support and they didn’t rate much better in any of the other areas. One fellow said that he had been promoting his web site heavily and as soon as he started to get decent traffic to his site, they simple shut it off. He said that if he had lived in the U.S. he definitely would have sued. Another said that they also shut his site off for no reason and would not respond to his emails. Well needless to say, I started to panic, primarily due to the fact that I had just completed a major overhaul of my site and did not yet have a backup of the current site. Visions of many late nights of working feverishly to rebuild everything raced through my head. Just then the site was back up, fully functioning, just as though nothing happened. I was certainly relieved but not to happy about the lack of information or response from the hosting company.
The next morning I opened my email to find a response, finally, from my soon to be ex-hosting company. They basically reamed me out for have sent three emails about the problem. They went on to tell me how “people like me” cause web hosting costs to increase because I force them to read through duplicate emails, wasting their precious time. I managed to hold my composure long enough to reply, telling them that part of customer service is keeping the customer informed and that had they responded to the first email they wouldn’t have received the other two. I received a reply from their sales department that stunned me. It was an email explaining that if I didn’t like their customer support that I should go with a different company and listed the steps I should follow to terminate my account with them.
That did it! I had enough! I began searching for a web hosting company that was rated very highly in dependability and customer service. I began thinking about someone who had a web site which provided their primary source of income. Suppose that site went down without explanation! Or maybe, you have an ad-sense site that you have worked on for years to get to the point where it has significant enough traffic to generate decent revenue. It takes too long to build a website and get traffic to that site to trust it to some cheap hosting company that doesn’t give a flying fig about you, your business or your website. When all was said and done, the new hosting company cost me one dollar a month more and actually has a phone number you can call and speak with a real person in customer support.
In conclusion, the decision of which company to choose for your web-hosting is far more important than I ever realized. Choose a company based on customer reviews and legitimate un-biased hosting review sites. Never go with a hosting company that does not provide a phone number you can call for customer support. Price is certainly important but a few dollars a month is not worth the risk of losing your site, reputation or revenue. Last but not least, backup, backup and backup.
