Bad web hosts and how to avoid
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011Check around and you’ll find a plethora of uk business class web hosting nightmare tales. Businesses who don’t realise they are being hosted by a teenager. Wondering why their website hosting and emails suddenly disappear off the face of the earth, and the host is not returning emails, well they would be unable to! or their telephone. The cause? Little Johnny has had his computer taken away and been grounded for getting a detention. Ok, so my hypothetical situation sounds a bit far fetched doesn’t it? Again, have a Google- there are far worse situations where webmasters have found themselves in a whole world of hurt. Why? Well they ended up picking the wrong web hosting company. There might not be a foolproof way of weeding out bad hosts, there is some tips I will give you on typical signs on the website of the company.
Hosts website has no contact address.
Without a contact address starts to break the distance selling laws in the UK. Would a reputable business not provide an address to contact them at if they ever had an issue? A business that doesn’t provide a mailing address stinks of a bedroom web host.
Reckoning to have multiple datacentres of there own.
I do not know about you, but I preffer doing my business with companies who are honest, or try to be honest. If you had a little shop, would you try and claim that you actually had a string of supermarkets. This is the same for web hosts reckoning to ‘have’ their own datacentre. A lot of hosts claim to be running their own servers, when in facts it’s a managed dedicated server.I can tell you as a fact that only a tiny proportion of hosts have the time and the resources to run their own datacentre. Not owning your own datacentre is usually not a bad thing. But when a web host starts claiming they do it’s normally bad news.
How long does a bad host take to respond to their emails?
With email being the choice of communication in the electronic age. You have a few questions about the service you would want to send off an email with your queries in and get a response back to your inbox. Its the same as if a company did not answer the phone, would you want to trust them with your business? Similarly if a web host takes more than a day to reply to a sales email it does not bode well. Well if it takes them so long to answer a sales email, which is what can make them some money, how long will they take if you need support? But having said that, don’t be fooled by the web hosts that respond to sales emails instantly, but if you want help, they don’t care.
How does the English sum up?
Generally, a big indicator of the professionalism of a web host, is their spelling and grammar. You have no doubt come accross websites with wrongly spelt words who claim to be the ‘garetest’ web host on the ‘word wipe web’. If your potential host can’t spell, or worse case can’t take the time to spell check their website, the advertising pitch, how can you trust them to host your website?
Want to find a decent web host instead?
On the other hand there are a number of good business class hosting companies. The pointers we have given above are only just scratching the surface on spotting a bad host. A web host can be a very difficult choice. When picking your next business quality web host, make sure you do your home work please. Sear the internet for reviews, and also speak to existing customers. Google can dish the dirt brilliantly on a company. Look up the company and see what you find. Above all, remember when you pay for your hosting, pay monthly so you can move on if the host turns bad, and if the ugly stuff does go flying, ensure you have a backup. Best of luck.