Ben at WebHostingUnleashed has written an excellent article, giving us 9 Tips For Not Getting Screwed By Your Web Host. So far I have counted myself lucky that I have not been “screwed” in any way by web hosting companies, but I have read countless bad stories on Internet and web-hosting related forums. As I have previously blogged about Lunarpages’ article on why web hosts suck, hopefully Ben’s article can help you to choose the web hosts that suck less.

Here are some of my thoughts on each of Ben’s tips.

1. Keep Your Domains Separate From Your Hosting Company

IMHO most excellent tip! It is more than separating domain registrar from web hosting company, but also choosing a reputable registrar right from the beginning. It is something I was always trying to tell people on one of the shared hosting company’s forum (whom I was a customer), but somehow the people over there do not really like that idea :) Domain names are your identities on the Internet, which are far more expensive to replace. Whereas hosting companies are just somewhere your identities accommodate. Despite the myth, they do not have to be registered/hosted at the same company.

Some people argued otherwise for convenience sake. Actually most web hosting companies would love you to have your domains registered with them, as domain name registration is their other revenue stream. However, it will not be that convenient when your web hosting company decided to go down together with your domains. Let us look at the procedure to transfer domain and hosting away to a new provider, in case the old provider went out of business.

Transfering hosting

Transfering domain

Sign up a new web hosting account elsewhere. Re-upload all the content to new host. You do have backups, don’t you? Tell your registrar to switch DNS to the new host. Wait for DNS to propagate… Done! Total time wasted — a bit more than 24 hours, mostly waiting for DNS propagation.

Sign up an account at a new domain registrar. Request domain transfer to the new registrar. The new registrar is asking for something called “EPP code”? WTF? Turns out you need to get the EPP code from the old registrar, whose management page times out on you… How about requesting EPP/Auth code to be emailed to you? Oops. The old registrar put their own email address under both registrant and tech contact. Then you remembered you have turned on a setting said “lock this domain”… D’oh … After running around between the old registrar (who turns out to be a reseller), its wholesale registrar, your new registrar, ICANN, etc, you have finally re-claimed the ownership of the domain again! But it was many months later, costing you lots of time, lots of visitors and potential customers, lots of revenue and your number 1 spot at Google’s SERP.

Personally I use Namecheap (an eNom reseller) and GoDaddy (a fully-accredited registrar) for my TLD domains, and IntaServe for my .AU domains. They are cheap, and have no real issue with them so far.

2. Diskspace and Bandwidth Are Marketing Terms

Diskspace and bandwidth — these numbers are not relevant to majority of people shopping for shared web hosting. I used to ask myself, “what if my site becomes very popular overnight, and attracts thousands and millions of visitors? I will be paying hefty fine on the data transfer!!” Well, that never happened, and I doubt it will ever happen. I am still using less than 10% of of my hosting packages’ allocation, and the growth of my sites’ traffic is far slower than the growth of web hosts’ bandwidth allocation. But it is easy to be sucked into those big numbers, isn’t it?

An interesting web hosting company that I wish to review in the near future is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. If there is a web hosting company that does not oversell, they will be the one — you pay for every megabytes you use in disk space and data transfer. You even have to pay for your own MySQL instance! If your attempt to be popular on the web has failed miserably, and your blog is only attracting 20 unique visitors a day, then they might turn out to be a cheaper option at the end.

3. Test Support Before You Signup

No comment on this one, because I never do :)

I have to confess that I am a bit impulsive sometimes towards buying web hosting packages. I will do my research (see next point), but I do not want to “trouble” their support staffs just to test them out. Lucky I have not had any nasty experience so far.

4. Research The Host — Review Sites, Forums, and Blogs

One often used metrics is by searching “<hosting company> sucks” on Google, as it seems to become the standard way to bitch about a web hosting company. It is useful, but does not really give you the complete picture, because

• Big companies seem to suck more simply because they have more disgruntled customers, even though they might be only a small percentage of their overall customer base. No sucking report on the small hosts? Maybe because they have just changed their name, restarted the business, and have no real customer!
• Those reports usually appear on people’s blogs, which are very subjective! Moreover, if it is a blog, then rebuttals can be easily deleted by the authors to give one sided picture.
• It is easier to rant than to praise. If a web host works, they are just doing their job. If it doesn’t, then they all deserve to go to hell! It is much easier to find negative than positive reviews.

Personally I like forums like WHT, but as Ben has said, WHT is also full of people demanding the lot for nothing. At least on a web hosting forum, you can see how hosting companies (and their royal customers) deal with negative comments.

5. Save Money With Hosting Coupons

In an industry like web hosting, where companies are willing to pay 12 months of revenue for a single customer, it would be a very unwise thing to go shopping without searching for coupons or commission rebates.

And I was very unwise when I bought my very first hosting package at DreamHost…

Of course there are also many hosts that do not give out coupons, or do not even have an affiliation program. You don’t see them on people’s sidebar banners, nor those “Top 10 Webhosting” directory sites, but that does not mean they are not good hosts.

6. Do Your Own Backups — Trust No One!

That is how I concluded two weeks ago:

Sometimes I do wonder, should we rely on hosts to backup our servers for us?

The answer is a big NO. While the host is responsible for performing regular backups, it will be considered stupid not to have your own off-site backups.

There are a zillion ways to be screwed by your web hosting companies, but if you have backups, you can quickly ditch your old host and sign up a new one (provided your domain is registered elsewhere, see point 1). I always have a hot copy of all the files of my sites + daily backup of MySQL database, so I can restore files very quickly in case of disaster.

7. Use Paypal or a One Time Use Credit Card

I always use PayPal whenever I can, but for an entire different reason — it’s the only USD I have, and I do not want to pay the banks to do currency conversion.

Again, I have heard stories of dodgy hosts over charging ex-customers. Fortunately I have never encountered these issues, but YMMV.

8. Avoid Really Long Contracts Unless You Trust The Company

We all have seen companies giving you ridiculous discount for paying 24 months hosting up-front. Unless the company has a very good track record, and you will not feel too sad if that company does a grab ‘n’ run, then go for it!

Another argument for avoiding signing up long contract is the changing nature of the Internet. Things are changing all the time. Your business might be so well received and requires a dedicated server cluster 3 months after launching, which makes your 24 month pre-paid shared hosting useless. Or you might go bankrupt in 3 months which too renders your long-contract hosting plan useless. Or your host has been brought out. Or you become dissatisfied half way through…

Pay by the month is the way to go I think. Or even pay by the hour.

9. You Get What You Pay For - Don’t Stress!

Great suggestion. In most cases, you really get what you pay for. But don’t get too stressed if you follow Ben’s tips — most importantly the backups!

However there are also many foul crying customers trolling on web hosting forums saying the down time of their $5/month shared hosting is costing them thousand of dollars, every day! Well, here is my suggestion.

If you are really making thousands of dollars a day with your website, don’t be cheap, and do pay for quality web hosts! Even the expensive ones are a fraction of your revenue, they are tax deductible and will definitely help you to sleep well at night. :)