Guide To Web Hosts
Introduction Every Web site has to reside on a Web server in order for other people to be able to see it on the Internet. A Web server is a computer that is connected to the Internet all the time, that stores the pages that make up a Web site and sends those pages to users in response to their requests for them. When you type http://www.computerbob.com into your Web browser and press Enter, you're actually sending a request for the ComputerBob Home Page to the Web server on which that page resides. The Web server responds to your request by finding the ComputerBob Home Page on its hard drive and sending it to you. The sending of Web pages is called webhosting. A typical Web server can host hundreds of different Web sites at the same time.
Can You Set Up Your Own Web Server? If you could afford to have your home computer connected to the Internet all the time, and you could afford and knew how to install Web server software on it, then theoretically, your home computer could be a Web server. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Even if your home computer has a DSL line, a cable modem or other permanent connection to the Internet, your ISP may have policies that prohibit you from setting up your home PC as a Web server unless you pay them an additional fee each month. That's because, when you pay for a home Internet connection, you are normally paying to be able to browse the Internet, but if you were to set up your home computer as a Web server, then hundreds, or even thousands of people might use your connection at the same time to view your Web site. Those thousands of connections would use up a lot more of your ISP's server's capabilities and would slow down your ISP's network a lot more than one person browsing the Internet would. Even though some ISPs allow you to set up your own Web server, you would be unwise to do that unless you know enough about network and server security to be able to keep hackers and other online attacks out of your server.
What Is A Web Host? A Web host is a company that provides Web server space and webhosting services to customers, either for free or for a monthly or yearly fee. Hopefully the Web host that you choose will be maintained by competent professionals who know all about network and server security. Because your Web site is sharing the Web host's server space with hundreds of other Web sites, the fees are much less than what you'd have to pay to set up your own Web server at home -- in fact, many Web hosts provide their services for free, as long as you're willing to display their advertisements on your site. They even have easy-to-use online wizards that let you create your Web site by clicking on colors and backgrounds and pictures, and by typing the text that you want to appear on your Web pages, without you having to know anything at all about how to create a Web site.
Problems With Free Web Hosts Before you get all excited about free Web hosts, keep in mind that a free host could end up costing you more than a paid host, for a number of reasons, as I'll explain. I used several different free Web hosts from 1997-2000, including Angelfire, Geocities, Xoom (out of business), Tripod, FortuneCity, theGlobe, TalkCity (out of business), NeoTown (out of business), HyperMart, Virtual Avenue, NBCi (out of business) and Server101 (no longer free). Many free Web site hosts have millions of customers, and as a result, they often don't have either enough time or enough personnel to be able to give you any personal service or support. For example, I had a lot of technical problems with every free Web host I ever tried -- problems that often kept me from being able to update or even accessing my site, sometimes for days at a time. Yet, when I sent them email messages, telling them that my site had stopped working, most of the free hosts either didn't respond to my email at all, or they sent me a useless, generic reply that told me to look for the answer to my problem on their Web site (where I had already looked before I had written to them). If you ever post a message on the Microsoft FrontPage newsgroup, asking for help with a free Web host problem, you'll probably get several responses reminding you that "you get what you pay for," and encouraging you to move your site to a paid Web host. Many of the students who have taken my college Web courses have discovered that, often, the only way to get your nonfunctioning free Web site working again is to create a new username and sign up for a new free Web space from the same Web host; then republish your entire Web site to the new Web space; then write to all of your friends, telling them the new address of your Web site. Do that a few times in only a couple of months and you may decide that it would be less trouble to move your site to a good paid Web host.
In addition to having technical problems and providing poor technical support, most free Web hosts require you to display one or more annoying banner, floating, or pop-up advertisements on every single page of your site. Unfortunately, they often change their rules about how much advertising you must display on your site. In fact, that advertising is what "pays the bills" so that they can host your Web site for free. If you'd rather not have advertising on your site, you'll have to pay a small monthly fee to remove it, but you'll still run into the same technical problems and you'll probably still receive the same poor technical support that you got when your site was free.
Finally, because it is extremely difficult to make a profit by hosting Web sites for free, the companies that try to do it sometimes go out of business without warning, taking your Web site with them. That's what happened to me with two different free webhosting companies in the past, leaving me with no Web site at all while I frantically searched for a new Web host.
Finding A Good Free Web Host Knowing the risks up front, if you'd like to try a free Web host, the links at the beginning of this article will take you to the ones I've tried in the past, which are some of the most popular ones. If you use Microsoft FrontPage software to create your Web site, Microsoft maintains a list of free Web hosts that are FrontPage enabled, and FreeWebspace.net bills itself as "the largest searchable guide to free Web space providers." Also, do some research at the Web sites listed in the paragraph below -- often, users leave messages at those sites describing both good and bad experiences with free Web hosts.
Finding A Good Paid Web Host What if you're looking for a really good, reasonably priced paid Web host? There are plenty of paid Web hosts that advertise in the back of the major PC magazines, and you'll find many more of them if you do an Internet search for the term, "webhosting," or "Domain hosting." Are those highly advertised Web hosts the best ones out there? Often they're not. Find out how each Web host compares to the others by visiting WebHostingTalk, or SitePoint Forums. I found my current Web host by reading reviews as well as hundreds of messages from other users on those sites, over a period of a few weeks. There are many other Web sites that recommend good hosting companies, but you would be wise to be very skeptical of their recommendations -- many of those other recommendation sites are either paid by or owned by the very same hosting companies that they recommend, and the Web hosts that they "highly recommend" are often given very poor ratings by real Webmasters at the WebHostingTalk and SitePoint Forums
Once you've narrowed your choices to a few Web hosts, ask each of their customer service departments for the names of a few Web sites that they host - most reputable Web hosts are usually happy to provide that information to you, with their customers' permission, of course. Once you have the names of at least one Web site from each Web host that you're considering, sign up for SiteUptime's free site monitoring. SiteUptime will test any Web sites for you, every 30 or 60 minutes, and will notify you by email any time one of them is unreachable. You can also log-in to your free SiteUptime account and view detailed statistics about the reliability of the sites that you're testing. By using SiteUptime's service to monitor Web sites at your top Web host choices, you'll get a good idea of the uptime, errors, etc. that your Web site would experience if it were running on those same Web hosts' servers. Don't use SiteUptime to monitor the speed and uptime of each Web host's home page, because Web hosts' home pages often run much faster than your Web site would run if you were to host it at that same Web host. That's because many Web hosts run their own home page on its own, really fast server, while they run hundreds of their customers' Web sites on slower servers.
To help you figure out which Web host is right for you, the following sections summarize several things that are important to keep in mind as you look.
Price You can find companies offering webhosting for as little as $3/month, or as much as $100 or more/month, depending on what each Web host charges for the services and what features your site needs. Some Web hosts also charge a one-time setup fee of up to $25. If you have more than one Web site, some hosts have plans that allow you to have up to 5 different Web sites in your one account, for just one monthly fee. In the past, I've tried free Web hosts and $6-8/month Web hosts, but I was never happy with their speed, services or support, so now I choose to pay a little more per month and work with a fast, reliable hosting company.
Domain Hosting Domain hosting means that, instead of your Web site having an address that includes your hosting company's name (like www.MyWebHostingCompany.com/MyUserName), your Web site has its own domain name (like ComputerBob.com). Some Web hosts charge extra for domain hosting. Domain hosting (ComputerBob.com) is included in the monthly fee that I pay to host ComputerBob.com.
Domain Name Registration Domain hosting does NOT include the cost of actually renting the domain name that you want (like ComputerBob.com). If you want your own domain name, you'll have to register it with the proper Web authorities. Depending on what company you use to register your domain name, it will generally cost you $5-$40/year for the right to use your domain name. Many Web hosts will charge you a $25-75 processing fee if they fill out your domain registration paperwork for you, while other Web hosts will do it for you for free when you sign up to have them host your Web site. If at all possible, don't have your Web host register your domain name for you. It might seem like they're doing you a favor, but it could end up costing you a lot of trouble or money in the future. The Web is full of horror stories from people whose Web hosts registered their domain names for them. The problem is, a lot of Web hosts will register your domain name for you, but they will list themselves as the owner of the domain name, instead of you, when they fill out the domain registration paperwork. Later, when you try to move your Web site to different Web host, you discover that you can't take your domain name with you, because your old Web host is the legal owner of your domain name. To make matters worse, your old Web hosts may make it extremely difficult for you to transfer your domain name to a new Web host, or they may even charge you a lot of money to "buy" your own domain name back from them. In stark contrast to that scenario, if you register your domain name yourself, and you list yourself as the owner, technical contact, administrative contact, billing contact, etc., then you, and only you, will have total control over your domain name. And you will be able to easily take your domain name with you any time you move your Web site to a different Web host. It may take you an hour's work to figure out how to register your domain name yourself, but, if you choose a good domain registrar (domain registration company) the process is much simpler than it used to be. Add to that the fact that reputable Web hosts are happy to email you the few lines of technical information that you'll need to put in your domain registration application, and reputable domain registrars are happy to help you register your domain name. When I first registered my ComputerBob.com domain name, I did the paperwork myself, and I registered it with the only existing domain registrar at the time, Network Solutions (now called Verisign). They charged me $35/year for my registration, with the first two years ($70) payable in advance. Each time I needed to make a change to my domain information -- like when I moved to a different Web host --I had to find and then fill out Network Solutions' long, confusing forms, submit those forms, and then wait up to 2 weeks for them to add my changes to their domain database. Fortunately, Network Solutions (Verisign) now has many, many competitors who have greatly simplified the domain registration process, and offer much cheaper prices. My current domain registrar is NameCheap. It took less than 2 minutes to transfer my domain registrations, using the onscreen tools on NameCheap's Web site. I pay $8.88/year for my domain name, and, if I change Web hosts, it only takes a few minutes to make the necessary changes to my domain information, using NameCheap's online domain management screens. I chose NameCheap because it is a reseller for eNom.com (one of the biggest domain registrars in the world), so if NameCheap ever goes out of business, eNom.com will still retain my domain registrations. Plus, NameCheap was recommended by many Webmasters at the WebHostingTalk forums, and its low price includes many features, like URL forwarding, the ability to lock my domain name to prevent anyone from stealing it, a feature that hides my email address from spammers, and much more. And because I signed up for NameCheap's optional domain information protection service, my name, address, telephone number, and email address are all completely hidden from spammers in my domain registration records, so I no longer have to pay $38/year to rent a tiny post office box to use as my address in my domain registration records.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: May 7, 2004 -- I used RegisterFly's domain registration service for an entire year, but I found its Web site to be extremely slow, buggy, and user-unfriendly, and its "Live 24/7 Support" to be either totally unavailable or disturbingly uninformed and unhelpful. For example, even after a site redesign that was supposed to speed up the whole RegisterFly site, I still had to wait 45 seconds or longer for each RegisterFly Web page to load, and the site is organized into so many sub-levels that I had to view a lot of other pages in order to get to the ones that I wanted. In addition, I tried to reach RegisterFly's "Live 24/7 Support" on 5 separate occasions, and each time, I waited almost 30 minutes for a support person to show up before finally giving up and disconnecting. Each time I've wrote to RegisterFly to complain, they told me that the fixes to the problems that I reported were going to be installed "next week," but months later, the problems were still not fixed. Finally, I repeatedly found this Web site's domain name "unlocked," even after I repeatedly "locked" it on the RegisterFly site -- a huge security risk that could have allowed someone to "hijack" my domain name by transferring it to a different domain registrar without my permission. As a result of all of those problems, I no longer trusted or wanted to do business with RegisterFly. So, even though my 3 years of RegisterFly's prepaid ProtectFly service on 2 of my domains wasn't due to expire until 2007, I took a loss and transferred all of my domain registrations back to NameCheap, the fast, simple and reliable domain registrar that I used before I switched to RegisterFly.
Web Page Creation Support If you're not an experienced Web site creator, you may appreciate a Web host that offers some type of easy-to-use automatic online Web page creation feature that walks you through the steps of creating a Web site. My current Web host does not offer this feature, but I don't care, because I prefer to use Macromedia Dreamweaver Web creation software.
FrontPage Support If you use Microsoft FrontPage software to create your Web site, you will want to use a Web host whose Web servers are FrontPage enabled, so that your FrontPage hit counters, online forms, and other proprietary FrontPage features will work. Some Web hosts charge extra for FrontPage enabled webhosting. My Web host includes FrontPage support at no extra charge, though I do not use it.
Storage Space Most Web hosts give you at least 10-50MB of storage space for your Web site on their server's hard drive. Unless you're planning to have a large Web site or tons of photographs and audio/video clips on your site, you probably don't have to worry about how much Web space each Web host will give you. To give you a few examples, a Web site of 5-10 pages, with a few graphics or photographs on each page, probably uses a total of less than 2MB of space, while the ComputerBob Web site, with its hundreds of pages and hundreds of graphics and photographs, uses about 75MB of space.
Bandwidth (Monthly Transfer) Each time someone accesses your Web site, they're downloading a certain number of Web pages, pictures, etc. Each of those files takes up some of your Web host's network time and capacity as it is being transferred. That network capacity is commonly known as "bandwidth." Web hosts keep track of how many megabytes of bandwidth your site uses each month, and they either cancel your account or charge you more if your site uses more bandwidth than you paid for. Unless your site is huge or has hundreds of visitors per day, you probably won't need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. The ComputerBob.com site currently uses less than 2GB of bandwidth per month.
Server and Network Specs Some Web hosts use older computers as servers. While that saves them money, it can cause your Web pages to load slowly if your Web site is being hosted along with several hundred other Web sites on the same slow server. Currently, I've known of Web hosts whose servers have one original Pentium processor running as slow as 400Mhz, with as little as 128MB of RAM memory. Other Web hosts have servers with Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz processors or better, with 4GB or more of RAM. Some Web hosts offer webhosting on servers that run Microsoft server software. Other Web hosts offer webhosting on servers that run UNIX or Linux server software. Usually, you have to pay a little more per month to have your Web site hosted on a Microsoft server, because the Microsoft server software is more expensive and more difficult to configure and maintain, and because it doesn't allow the Web host to have as many users on one server as they could have on a UNIX or Linux server. Also, Microsoft Web servers have traditionally had many more security problems than UNIX or Linux servers. That's why I recommend that you always choose a Web host that runs UNIX or Linux-based Web servers, unless your Web site runs a Microsoft MS SQL database or some other application that specifically requires it to run on a Microsoft-based Web server. If your Web site needs a database, but you would rather not run a Microsoft database on a Microsoft server, many UNIX or Linux Web hosts will provide your Web site with one or more MySQL (UNIX/Linux) databases, often at no additional charge. I use one MySQL database to hold all of the data in ComputerBob's Forums, and another MySQL database to hold all of the data in my User Ratings pages. Getting back to the subject of server specifications, sometimes a highly advertised Web host turns out to be a teenager with a computer running in their basement, connected to a cable modem or a DSL connection that only has the capacity to handle one person's networking needs. If you make the mistake of putting your Web site on that type of server, your Web pages are going to load very slowly, because you'll be sharing the server's network capacity with all of the other Web sites that are hosted on that teenager's computer. Generally speaking, the faster and "more connected" your Web host's server is, the faster and more reliable your Web site will be. My Web host is connected through high-speed routers and protocols to several Tier-1 Internet backbones. If you think of Internet traffic as cars driving all over the world, then the teenager's basement example would be the equivalent of a bike path; many Web hosts are on the equivalent of a two-lane highway, but my current Web host is right at the intersection of several 16-lane superhighways.
NOC! NOC! Who's There? A Network Operations Center (a NOC -- also called a Data Center) is usually a large, very secure building that has many high-speed, high-capacity network connections, and houses many Web servers. A NOC usually also has its own backup electrical power, automated server backup systems, and air conditioning systems. Because it costs millions of dollars to build a NOC, many webhosting companies can't afford their own NOC. Many Web hosts can't even afford to buy own their own Web servers. In fact, many webhosting companies aren't even in the same state as their Web servers! How can that be? Because many webhosting companies consist of just one or two (hopefully knowledgeable) individuals who rent servers that are running in someone else's NOC, and they administer their servers remotely, over the Internet. The webhosting company then rents some of their rented server space to you. A webhosting company that rents its servers from someone else is called a reseller. For the purposes of this article, a company that owns its own servers and either owns or rents space in a NOC is a hosting provider. Because resellers often buy or rent many servers from a hosting provider, they get a huge discount that they can pass on to you. That's why it is cheaper to host your Web site with a reseller than it would be to host it directly with a hosting provider. The disadvantage to hosting with a reseller is that, if you have a tech support problem, your reseller may be the only person running their entire webhosting business, so you may have to wait for them to get around to fixing your problem. Because your reseller's company is often not even in the same city as their hosting provider's servers, your reseller can often end up being a middleman between you and their hosting provider. If your reseller can't figure out what your problem is and fix it on the Web server by remote control over the Internet, or if they determine that something needs to be physically fixed or replaced in a Web server, your reseller has to contact someone who actually works in their hosting provider's NOC and ask them to work on the problem. Then, if the tech support people at the NOC have any questions about your problem, they have to write back to your reseller, who then has to write back to you to ask you the questions, then, after you reply to your reseller, they have to send your answers back to the hosting provider, etc., etc. To get the most for my money, I usually look for a Web host that owns its own servers but rents space for them in a world-renowned datacenter that has 7/24/365 tech support, provided by highly-qualified support professionals.
Beware Of Unlimited Offers Many cheap Web hosts currently claim to offer "unlimited storage" and "unlimited bandwidth." Don't believe them -- there is no such thing as unlimited storage or unlimited bandwidth. Every Web host has to pay for the storage space and bandwidth that they offer to their customers, so a Web host would go bankrupt if it tried to actually offer its users as much storage and bandwidth as they wanted. Unscrupulous Web hosts simply use "unlimited" offers as a marketing trick (lie) to lure users to sign up for their services. The fact is, there's always some fine print in the Web host's service agreement that allows them to cancel the user's account if it uses an "unreasonable" amount of storage or bandwidth, though the service agreement rarely states how much storage or bandwidth the Web host considers to be an "unreasonable" amount. Then, as soon as a user starts actually using whatever unspecified amount of storage that the Web host considers "unreasonable," the Web host suddenly cancels the user's account without warning. For more details, see UnlimBand, an entire Web site devoted to educating people about the dangers of "unlimited" offers.
Beware Of Too-Good-To-Be-True Offers Many Web hosts offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and storage for extremely low prices, like 10GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth for $3.95 per month. Stay away from them. They will go out of business soon, and without warning, taking your money and your Web sites with them. To host a single Web site, expect to pay a reliable Web host $5-10 per month to get 50-100MB of storage and 5-10GB of bandwidth.
Email Addresses Some Web hosts allow you to set up only 1 or 2 POP mail addresses at your domain name. If you need more than that, be sure that your Web host provides them.
Server Location Generally speaking, with all other factors being equal, the closer that you are, geographically, to your Web host's servers, the faster you'll be able to publish your Web site to their servers. On the other hand, a server that is geographically close to you may be geographically far away from your site's visitors, causing your site to load slowly for them. Keep both of those things in mind when you choose a Web host. Don't choose a Web host whose servers are in a different country than you are in, unless you expect that most of the people that visit your site will be in that other country.
Administrator Tools Some Web hosts provide extensive online tools for Web administrators, while others either provide little or no administrator functions. Look for a Web host whose services give you a lot of features, like an administrative control panel (i.e. the popular cPanel) that lets you view your hard disk (storage) quota, view your monthly transfer amount, set up email addresses, change your password, troubleshoot the network, set up a hit counter, protect folders, set up URL redirects, create and configure databases, set up FTP access, configure an email anti-Spam tool, download backups of your site, and and much more..
Technical Support All paid Web hosts provide some type of technical support. Some paid Web hosts do not provide any telephone support at all. Many Web hosts brag about providing great support, but then take 2-3 days to reply to a simple question. You may not need support that is faster than that, but when there is a problem with this Web site, I want support right away. My Web host provides 7/24/365 tech support by email, an online support ticket system, an online knowledgebase, and online support forums. I've written to them several times, and they have always replied knowledgeably and politely, within 1 hour, even in the middle of the night and on a Sunday morning.
Extras Your Web site may or may not need them, but some Web hosts either don't offer them at all, or they charge extra for things like Secure Server, PHP, Perl, SSI, MySQL (database), CGI, formmail, shopping cart and mailing lists.
Read The Fine Print Unfortunately, there are some sleazy Web hosts out there, looking to make a few quick bucks by cheating people. Rochen Hosting, one of my previous Web hosts, had one sentence, hidden deep within several pages of their Terms of Service, that said that all new clients would be charged for six months of service, even if they canceled their account before six months. That's the type of sleazy, self-serving clause that would send any intelligent potential customer running for the door, which I'm sure is why they hid it so well. Not having seen that sentence, I signed up for Rochen Host's service. Almost instantly, I discovered that their reliability and support were both horrible, so I canceled my account about two weeks later. I was shocked to see that Rochen Host continued to bill my credit card every month for 5 more months of Web hosting service. When I complained to my credit card company about those additional charges, Rochen Host showed my credit card company that one sentence, hidden in their Terms of Service. So, they got six months worth of my money, but they've earned a really bad reputation for anyone who reads this article.
Should You Pay Monthly, Quarterly, Semiannually, or Yearly? Many Web hosts give you the option to get a significant discount if you prepay for up to one year of Web hosting. It used to be that if you canceled your account before the end of your prepaid time, those hosts would give you a prorated refund for your unused prepaid services. Unfortunately, many Web hosts now refuse to give you any refund if you cancel your account before you've used all of your prepaid services. That means that if you sign up for a Web host that has that policy, and you pay for one year of service in advance, but then you're unhappy with their service and cancel your account a week later, you won't get any refund for the rest of your prepaid year of service. If you're thinking of prepaying for Web hosting services, be sure you know exactly what your Web host's policies are regarding refunds for prepaid services, and be sure that they promise to notify you in writing if they ever change those policies.
Paid Web Hosts That I Have Used Server101 - I had many problems related to the fact that their servers were located in Australia and I live in the U.S.A. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Server101.
Christian Web Host - I was very happy with their low price and numerous features. I left Christian Web Host after about two years because my ComputerBob Web site was mission-critical to my being able to teach my college students, and CWH could not provide the fast 7/24/365 technical support that I required. Based on my experience with them, I RECOMMEND Christian Web Host to anyone who doesn't have a mission-critical Web site, because they offer a lot of features for the price, and they're very friendly and easy to work with. If he's still there, please tell Lance that ComputerBob says hi.
Aletia Hosting - Luckily, they had a 30-day money back guarantee. I signed up with them because they had been highly rated by many posters at the WebHostingTalk forums in the past. Within a day or two of signing up with them, I sent Aletia tech support a simple question that had not been answered in their online documentation. It took them 36 hours to reply. Unhappy with their lack of support, I canceled my account after only a few days and asked for a refund. They ignored my cancellation request for several days until I finally posted a public message at WebHostingTalk, telling about my situation -- a few hours later, I received email confirmation that Aletia had canceled my account and issued a refund to my credit card. Within a few weeks, a few hundred people had posted messages complaining about Aletia's lack of support, and the problems they had when they tried to cancel their Aletia accounts. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Aletia Hosting.
Rochen Hosting - I canceled my account about two weeks after I switched my domain to their server, because on their server, my Web site seemed to have more downtime than on any Web host I had ever used, and it often took them several hours to reply to my support requests. They seemed to be a very small (one person?) company that had a lot of technical problems and just couldn't keep up with answering their support requests. Then, after I canceled my account, they continued to charge my credit card for another five months. When I first wrote this article, their main Web site was down for so long that I assumed that they had gone out of business. Months later, I learned that they were still in business, but their Web site being down for so long was apparently due to them still having serious technical problems. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Rochen Hosting.
AnimationFX - I left after only a few days, after I received numerous error messages from their FTP server and saw that they were missing entire Web pages in their MySQL (database) configuration program. I got the impression that they were a new hosting company that "wasn't ready for prime time" yet. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND AnimationFX.
Ventures Online - I was with Ventures Online for a year. They provided excellent service and technical support with virtually no problems (pun intended) for only $9.95/month for one Web site/domain. They also offered a $7.95/month hosting package that didn't include any MySQL databases, and more expensive packages that offered even more space and bandwidth. Many Webmasters and resellers in the WebHostingTalk forums have written glowing reports about VO's fast servers, fast network, and excellent tech support. Based on my experience with them, I RECOMMEND Ventures Online to both beginners and experienced Webmasters.
CredibleHost - I was with CredibleHost for a less than a week. Their reseller plans had a lot of features, and were competitively priced, but their reliability and tech support were both horrible. Though CredibleHost employs a few part-timers, they have only one full-time system administrator, so I consider CredibleHost to be a very risky one-person operation. For example, the server that my sites were on crashed before my sites even had time to start working, and it took the lone systems administrator 40 hours to get that server going again. After 36 hours with no Web sites and no email, I moved my sites back to my previous webhost, but I kept checking the CredibleHost support forums to see how things were going. A few days after that server was finally running again, its datacenter shut it down on purpose for several days for investigation and to rebuild it, because hacker scripts were found in one of its folders. According to users' messages in CredibleHost's support forums, server downtimes, email downtimes, hacker attacks, slow tech support, and long-term problems that go unsolved are disturbingly common at CredibleHost. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND CredibleHost.
Dathorn - Many Webmasters and resellers in the WebHostingTalk forums have written glowing reports about Dathorn, and their reseller packages were very tempting; however, after they gave me rude and evasive answers to my simple pre-sales questions, I decided that I will never give them my business. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Dathorn.
FluidHosting - I was with FluidHosting for more than 13 months. Their price/features were very fair, their datacenter and network were both world-class, and their support and reliability were both excellent. In all the time that I was with them, I don't think my sites ever had even one unscheduled downtime. The only reason I left FluidHosting was because I wanted a reseller account, and even FluidHosting's cheapest one was way out of my budget. Based on my experience with them, I RECOMMEND FluidHosting to both beginners and experienced Webmasters.
BitstreamHosting - I had my webhosting reseller account with BitstreamHosting for about 1 month. Their price/features were very fair, their datacenter and network were both world-class, and their support and reliability were both good -- for a little more than 2 weeks after I joined them. Then, for some unexplained reason, their support suddenly became nonexistent, and complaints from their clients piled up for almost 2 weeks without any responses. I suspect that Bitstream is a 1 or 2-person operation, and something probably happened to those 1 or 2 people. I didn't want to wait for Bitstream's problems to affect my clients and me, so I quickly moved my reseller account to Bright-Byte (see below). Several days after I had used Bitstream's online Member Account Center to cancel my account, my cancellation was still listed there as PENDING. When I went back to check the BitstreamHosting support forums after I had canceled my account, I saw that BitstreamHosting had deleted 2 weeks worth of complaints and cancellation notices from their many angry users -- a practice that I believe is extremely unscrupulous. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND BitstreamHosting.
BliksemHosting - I had a reseller account with BliksemHosting for less than one week in late December, 2005. Even though my clients' and my Web sites used less than 1/5 of the storage space that I had paid for, and in an entire month would have used less than 1/15 of the monthly transfer that I had paid for, someone named "Jav" (pronounced "Hahv") from Bliksem called me at home to tell me that I should probably find a different Web host because he didn't like the "tone" of a support ticket that I had opened. The support ticket in question was actually a very polite one, in which I told them that SpamAssassin was still running even after I had turned it off in my Web site's control panel. After scolding me for not understanding his cryptic responses to my support ticket, Jav told me that I was also in danger of violating Bliksem's Terms of Service because my reseller account was sending out far more email messages than any of the other 800 accounts on their server. I asked him to please explain what could possibly cause that problem, because I know for a fact that my clients and I together never send out more than a total of 20 email messages per day. He refused to give me any details, but told me that he knows more about running a server than I do, so I should trust him. He was so full of himself that he barely allowed me to even say more than a few words at a time. No matter how long I stayed silent and let him talk, sometimes for a minute or two at a time, he scolded me like a small child for interrupting him every single time I tried to say anything. When I asked him to clarify his cryptic responses to my SpamAssassin support ticket questions, he insisted on reading every single word of my support ticket and all of his responses out loud to me. As he read them out loud, he made sarcastic comments, such as "See, Robert, right there was the fourth time that we explained the same thing to you, but you still refused to understand." When I repeatedly tried to tell him that his responses hadn't made any sense to me, he sternly scolded me again for interrupting him, and continued reading out loud. When he finally finished reading to me, I was able to tell him that his reponses hadn't made any sense to me and hadn't even come close to answering my questions. Then, I started to try to explain why that was, but he immediately "talked over me," saying things like, "Well, when we wrote that response, we assumed that someone who calls himself "ComputerBob" would know more than you know, but you obviously know nothing about administering a Linux Web server that has over 800 users." Though Jav continued to insult me, and obviously had absolutely no interest in hearing anything that I had to say, I kept trying to win him over to be my friend. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, he continued to "talk over me," accused me of interrupting him, and refused to let me finish even one sentence. Mostly out of morbid curiosity, but also to gather evidence for this article, I allowed him to completely dominate the conversation for an entire hour. Even I have my limits, though, so I finally gave up and hung up my phone very quietly in the middle of one of his pontifications. In fact, he's probably still scolding me right now, happy that I'm no longer interrupting him, and totally oblivious to the fact that I hung up on him more than 6 hours ago. I DO NOT RECOMMEND BliksemHosting.
UPDATE, July 5, 2006: I just received an email message that confirms that Bliksemhosting's customer service skills are still just as bad as they were for me more than six months ago:
Hi Bob,
I just wanted to say thank you for what you have written on your site about Bliksemhosting. I live in Australia, and last night at 4am - I too received a phone call from Jav.
My tone of my support tickets was inappropriate also. I asked him politely to call back in a couple of hours and we can talk about it. His only response? "You have 24 hours to remove your data and get off his servers". In the days preceeding there were some catestrophic HDD failures on the server I am on, and I was asking some fairly detailed technical questions as to why. I didn't know his name was 'Hahv'. In fact, at 4am the only name I feel like calling someone isnt exactly correct - politically or otherwise. I called him 'Jav'. (Don't make that mistake)
I left the phone call feeling so angry. Angry at being woken at that time, as well as annoyed that my email had been deemed as 'offensive'. I very carefully worded it to ensure there was no finger-pointing, but he resorted to that.
I appreciate what you wrote. I was feeling as if I had done/said something wrong, but from your site, and many many other forums I am not the only person to cop the abuse either.
Thanks :)
Andrew
Bright-Byte - I had a reseller account with Bright-Byte from May, 2004 until late October, 2006 (except for one week in December, 2005, that I tried Bliksemhosting). During that 2 /12 years, they hosted my Web sites and the Web sites of my clients. Bright-Byte's reseller accounts cost more than similar reseller accounts from BitstreamHosting or CredibleHost, but Bright-Byte provided great speed and reliability, and it had 7 full-time tech support people who provided outstanding 7/24/365 support. Unfortunately, Bright-Bytes support seemed to go downhill over time. When I first joined Bright-Byte, they seemed grateful when I reported and then helped them troubleshoot problems with their services. Unfortunately, their attitude changed over time. In the last several months before I left Bright-Byte, it seemed like I had to spend a lot of time trying to convince them that problems existed before they were willing to finally make an effort to solve them. The last straw -- and the reason that I left Bright-Byte -- came after they did an update to the "cPanel" administrative software on their servers. Afterward, I couldn't login to the cPanel of any of my accounts. When I opened a support ticket for the problem, they told me "You're the only one who's complaining about that problem." Despite the fact that I spent several hours giving them more details about the symptoms of the problem to try to convince them to solve it, it took them 12 hours to finally apply what turned out to be a 5-minute fix for the problem, because they waited until another client finally told them that they were having the same problem. After that, I wrote to Bright-Byte and told them that I believed that they owed me an apology for the dismissive and patronizing way that they had treated me. Two weeks later, they still hadn't replied, so I wrote to them again, to remind them that I had not received an apology. At that point, they politely apologized for the fact that they had failed to solve the technical problem quickly, but they didn't even mention the rude way that they had treated me. That same day, I decided to move to BliksemHosting (see below). Several days later, after I canceled my Bright-Byte account, I received another apology from Bright-Byte, saying, "The patronizing and insulting manner that you refer to may be due to the fact that English isn't one of the support techs (sic) first language and this could be why it appeared as above, please rest assured it was not their intention." I wrote back to tell them that if they had told me that 2 1/2 weeks earlier, I might not have canceled my accounts and moved to a different Web host. As things turned out, I returned to Bright-Byte after trying Bliksemhosting for just one week (see above), and stayed with Bright-Byte until October, 2006 (see below)
UPDATE, October 28, 2006: During the past week, I had several problems with Bright-Byte's web hosting. Their online payment system would allow me to login, but it wouldn't allow me to pay my monthly hosting fee with my credit card as I had done for the past 2 1/2 years. When I would try to pay, it would tell me that my shopping cart was empty. To me, it was obvious that the problem lay in the interface between Bright-Byte's billing page and the 2Checkout.com billing service that they utilize to collect their hosting fees. When I described the symptoms of the problem to them in great detail, their only response was to change my login password. From that point on, I couldn't even login to their billing page any more, let alone use it to pay for my monthly hosting fee. When I brought that to their attention, Bright-Byte's new owner wrote a patronizing reply to me, telling me that the support tech who had changed my password had done "the best he could" to solve the problem. When I replied that it appeared to me that the tech hadn't even bothered to read my lengthy, detailed support ticket, in which I described exactly what the problem was, Bright-Byte's new owner's replies got really rude and dismissive. He angrily accused me of trying to tell him how to run his business, how to collect his company's hosting fees, and how to deal with his employees. To make a long story short(er), more than two days after I had reported that Bright-Byte's online billing system wouldn't allow me to pay my monthly hosting fee, the problem still existed, and Bright-Byte's owner appeared to have little interest in solving it. In the meantime, I was afraid that Bright-Byte would terminate my account and shut down my web sites if I didn't pay them right away. Plus, because they had done something wrong when they had unecessarily changed my account password, I still couldn't even login to their billing page. To make matters worse, Bright-Byte's new owner rudely expressed his frustration at me several times, instead of solving the problems. I felt like he was treating me like I was bothering him, and I was a huge inconvenience, instead of a valued customer. As his replies got ruder, it was apparent to me that I was probably goint to have to find a new web host, so I decided to request a payment of the affiliate fees that I had earned in the past few months of being a Bright-Byte affiliate, so that if I decided to leave Bright-Byte, I would already have the money that they owed me:
Me: Bright-Byte's Affiliate Program Account Management screen states the following: "Receiving A PayPal Payment From Us Is Optional. If you choose not to receive PayPal payments from us, we'll send you a paper check in the mail." I currently have a balance of $50 in my Bright-Byte affiliate account, but I do not have a PayPal account. Please mail a paper affiliate payment check in the amount of $50 as soon as possible. Afterward, please send me an email confirmation that you have mailed the check to me. Thank you.
Bright-Byte: Dear XXXXXXXXX, You Have a Pending Payment. BBCSNetwork just sent you a payment with PayPal. Payment is sent by PayPal. I'm not writing you a check.
Me: Your web site says you will send me a paper check. I have requested that you send me a paper check. I expect you to honor the terms that you state on your web site.
Bright-Byte: Payment has been sent by PayPal. Take it or leave it. Check the site again.
(I didn't bother to check the Bright-Byte site again, but apparently, he wanted me to see that he had just changed the stated payment terms on the Bright-Byte's Affiliate Program Account Management screen to which I had referred.)
Me: You are an unethical person. I made it very clear to you a few days ago that I have no interest in opening a PayPal account, yet you insist on paying me by that method, even though Bright-Byte's web site said that you would send me a paper check.
Bright-Byte: No I'm not unethical. I paid you what you are owed. It's your decision to take it or leave it. Please take your business elsewhere. Do not contact me again. If you slander or libel Bright Byte in any way, I will file suit against you. Good bye.
When I read his last response, I suddenly started worrying that he might shut down my sites, disable my email accounts, or take some other type of retaliatory action against me. So, even though I had been awake nearly all night, dealing with him and the fact that I still couldn't even login to Bright-Byte's billing page, I spent the next 17 hours finding a new web host and moving my sites to it. Though I recommended Bright-Byte hosting in the past, and I even signed up for its affiliate program a few months ago, my opinion drastically changed in the last week that I dealt with Bright-Byte's new owner before I left Bright-Byte. I had a good relationship with Bright-Byte's previous owner for about 2 1/2 years, and I believe that he would be ashamed of his company's new owner's behavior. I DO NOT RECOMMEND Bright-Byte.
UPDATE, May 14, 2008: I received an email message from Bright-Byte today. Its title was "Client Notifier-Overdue by 90 days." The message itself said "This is a notice to inform you that your account with bright-byte.com has an overdue balance. You have one or more invoices that are overdue by 90 days or more. Your account will be deleted from the server in 48-72 hours. Below are the account and invoice details:..."
I sent the following reply to that message: "You have made a mistake. I cancelled my account with Bright-Byte in October, 2006. Please correct your records and do not bother me again."
The Web Host That I Use Now Since October 26, 2006, I have been using FluidHosting's web hosting services. I had been very happy with their services for more than a year, a few years ago. See my review of them, above. Instead of having a reseller account with each of my domains having its own separate control panel, I have a normal, shared-hosting account, but it allows me to host multiple domains, all under one umbrella control panel. Since I am the only person who administers the domains that I host, that works out well for me, and even though it costs me significantly more than what I had paid for web hosting in the past, it saves me a lot of money, compared to the cost of FluidHosting's true reseller accounts.
Check Out Any Potential Host Yourself Before you seriously consider signing up with any Web host, including those that I recommend, be sure to go to the sites listed in the Finding A Good Paid Web Host section above, and do a search for that host's name, to make sure that its reputation is still as good as it was when I recommended it. The reason I say that is because I've seen Web hosts get glowing reviews from people at one or more sites, and then a few months later, people at those same sites are complaining that the hosts' services and support have slipped to substandard levels, usually as a result of getting many new customers too quickly for their hardware and/or support staff to be able to adequately handle them.
After you find a Web host that is currently highly rated by other users at WebHostingTalk, there are some other things that you can do to check out a potential Web host. First of all, if you're interested in a particular web host because someone recommended them to you, then check out the credibility of the person who gave you the recommendation by visiting their web site. Does it load quickly, without delays? Does it look large and professional or is it just one amateurish-looking page? Does their site include links to independent, third-party site-uptime checking services, like the ones that you see in this site's left navigation column? If so, click on those uptime links and see how reliable their web host's service has been over the past year or longer. Uptime should be within a few hundredths of a percent of 100% at all times. Remember, even though 99.0% uptime sounds like it would be really good, a web host that has uptime of 99.0% has downtime of 7.2 hours every month. Would you be happy if your web site was down for 7.2 hours every month? If the recommending person's site looks amateurish, or if they don't provide any links to independent uptime statistics, then that might mean that the person whose site it is doesn't really know what they're doing. Maybe they recommended their web host to you simply because it's the web host that they use, instead of because it's a really good web host. Keep in mind that there are thousands of people out there recommending their own web hosts simply because they get a commission each time someone signs up for that web host. Or maybe even because they own or work for the web hosting company that they're recommending. By checking out their web site and its uptime, you'll learn to recognize and "weed-out" those types of biased recommendations.
Check the potential hosting company's Web site, to see if it looks professional or amateurish. If it looks amateurish, that's a dead giveaway that something is wrong. On the other hand, don't be fooled into thinking that it's a good web hosting company just because its web site looks professional. Many professional web hosting companies provide professional-looking web pages for their web hosting clients to use free of charge, so any kid who runs a web hosting business out of his parents' basement can steal and use a professional-looking web page to help them fool you into using their services. In fact, if you visit 10-20 different web hosting companies' web sites, you'll start to recognize that many of them have the exact same professional look; often with the exact same photograph of a friendly looking woman who's waiting to sign you up for their services. If I were you, I'd stay away from those web hosting companies.
If a potential web hosting company makes it to this point in your shopping process, then become a registered user of their forums and then read some of the users' questions and complaints in those forums. The reason you have to become a registered user of their forums is because some webhosts hide their complaint forums from the general public, so you won't see any complaints unless you become a registered user of their forums. If a lot of users complain that their problems aren't being resolved in a reasonable amount of time, then you may want to avoid using that Web host. If you don't see any complaints, it may be an indication that that particular Web host's clients are happy, or it may be an indication that that particular Web host deletes any complaints that it finds in its support forums (an unscrupulous practice that many Web hosts do). That's why it is important that you do more than just check a potential Web host's support forums before making your decision. If you are satisfied with what you learn from the potential Web host's support forums, then think of a couple of questions that you'd like answered about that host's prices or services. Then send them a couple of email messages with your questions, to see how quickly, knowledgeably, and politely they reply to you. If you have other questions resulting from their replies, then write to them again. It's extremely important to "try out" any potential Web host in that manner. If you're not happy with the replies that they send you when they're trying to win you over as a customer, then you probably wouldn't be happy with the replies that they would send you when you're their paying customer.
Bottom line: do your research and make sure that any Web host that you're considering is currently still as good or better than past reviews or recommendations of it have indicated. As you can see by my experiences with several web hosts in the past, there are many bad web hosts out there, and there are many things that can suddenly or gradually turn a good web host into a bad one, so be prepared to quickly move your web site(s) to a different web host any time it becomes necessary.
Conclusion The moral of the story is that, whether it's time and trouble, or inconvenience, or money, webhosting is always going to cost you something, but if you're smart and do your homework, you can find the best webhosting solution for your needs.
Can You Set Up Your Own Web Server? If you could afford to have your home computer connected to the Internet all the time, and you could afford and knew how to install Web server software on it, then theoretically, your home computer could be a Web server. Unfortunately, it's not that easy. Even if your home computer has a DSL line, a cable modem or other permanent connection to the Internet, your ISP may have policies that prohibit you from setting up your home PC as a Web server unless you pay them an additional fee each month. That's because, when you pay for a home Internet connection, you are normally paying to be able to browse the Internet, but if you were to set up your home computer as a Web server, then hundreds, or even thousands of people might use your connection at the same time to view your Web site. Those thousands of connections would use up a lot more of your ISP's server's capabilities and would slow down your ISP's network a lot more than one person browsing the Internet would. Even though some ISPs allow you to set up your own Web server, you would be unwise to do that unless you know enough about network and server security to be able to keep hackers and other online attacks out of your server.
What Is A Web Host? A Web host is a company that provides Web server space and webhosting services to customers, either for free or for a monthly or yearly fee. Hopefully the Web host that you choose will be maintained by competent professionals who know all about network and server security. Because your Web site is sharing the Web host's server space with hundreds of other Web sites, the fees are much less than what you'd have to pay to set up your own Web server at home -- in fact, many Web hosts provide their services for free, as long as you're willing to display their advertisements on your site. They even have easy-to-use online wizards that let you create your Web site by clicking on colors and backgrounds and pictures, and by typing the text that you want to appear on your Web pages, without you having to know anything at all about how to create a Web site.
Problems With Free Web Hosts Before you get all excited about free Web hosts, keep in mind that a free host could end up costing you more than a paid host, for a number of reasons, as I'll explain. I used several different free Web hosts from 1997-2000, including Angelfire, Geocities, Xoom (out of business), Tripod, FortuneCity, theGlobe, TalkCity (out of business), NeoTown (out of business), HyperMart, Virtual Avenue, NBCi (out of business) and Server101 (no longer free). Many free Web site hosts have millions of customers, and as a result, they often don't have either enough time or enough personnel to be able to give you any personal service or support. For example, I had a lot of technical problems with every free Web host I ever tried -- problems that often kept me from being able to update or even accessing my site, sometimes for days at a time. Yet, when I sent them email messages, telling them that my site had stopped working, most of the free hosts either didn't respond to my email at all, or they sent me a useless, generic reply that told me to look for the answer to my problem on their Web site (where I had already looked before I had written to them). If you ever post a message on the Microsoft FrontPage newsgroup, asking for help with a free Web host problem, you'll probably get several responses reminding you that "you get what you pay for," and encouraging you to move your site to a paid Web host. Many of the students who have taken my college Web courses have discovered that, often, the only way to get your nonfunctioning free Web site working again is to create a new username and sign up for a new free Web space from the same Web host; then republish your entire Web site to the new Web space; then write to all of your friends, telling them the new address of your Web site. Do that a few times in only a couple of months and you may decide that it would be less trouble to move your site to a good paid Web host.
In addition to having technical problems and providing poor technical support, most free Web hosts require you to display one or more annoying banner, floating, or pop-up advertisements on every single page of your site. Unfortunately, they often change their rules about how much advertising you must display on your site. In fact, that advertising is what "pays the bills" so that they can host your Web site for free. If you'd rather not have advertising on your site, you'll have to pay a small monthly fee to remove it, but you'll still run into the same technical problems and you'll probably still receive the same poor technical support that you got when your site was free.
Finally, because it is extremely difficult to make a profit by hosting Web sites for free, the companies that try to do it sometimes go out of business without warning, taking your Web site with them. That's what happened to me with two different free webhosting companies in the past, leaving me with no Web site at all while I frantically searched for a new Web host.
Finding A Good Free Web Host Knowing the risks up front, if you'd like to try a free Web host, the links at the beginning of this article will take you to the ones I've tried in the past, which are some of the most popular ones. If you use Microsoft FrontPage software to create your Web site, Microsoft maintains a list of free Web hosts that are FrontPage enabled, and FreeWebspace.net bills itself as "the largest searchable guide to free Web space providers." Also, do some research at the Web sites listed in the paragraph below -- often, users leave messages at those sites describing both good and bad experiences with free Web hosts.
Finding A Good Paid Web Host What if you're looking for a really good, reasonably priced paid Web host? There are plenty of paid Web hosts that advertise in the back of the major PC magazines, and you'll find many more of them if you do an Internet search for the term, "webhosting," or "Domain hosting." Are those highly advertised Web hosts the best ones out there? Often they're not. Find out how each Web host compares to the others by visiting WebHostingTalk, or SitePoint Forums. I found my current Web host by reading reviews as well as hundreds of messages from other users on those sites, over a period of a few weeks. There are many other Web sites that recommend good hosting companies, but you would be wise to be very skeptical of their recommendations -- many of those other recommendation sites are either paid by or owned by the very same hosting companies that they recommend, and the Web hosts that they "highly recommend" are often given very poor ratings by real Webmasters at the WebHostingTalk and SitePoint Forums
Once you've narrowed your choices to a few Web hosts, ask each of their customer service departments for the names of a few Web sites that they host - most reputable Web hosts are usually happy to provide that information to you, with their customers' permission, of course. Once you have the names of at least one Web site from each Web host that you're considering, sign up for SiteUptime's free site monitoring. SiteUptime will test any Web sites for you, every 30 or 60 minutes, and will notify you by email any time one of them is unreachable. You can also log-in to your free SiteUptime account and view detailed statistics about the reliability of the sites that you're testing. By using SiteUptime's service to monitor Web sites at your top Web host choices, you'll get a good idea of the uptime, errors, etc. that your Web site would experience if it were running on those same Web hosts' servers. Don't use SiteUptime to monitor the speed and uptime of each Web host's home page, because Web hosts' home pages often run much faster than your Web site would run if you were to host it at that same Web host. That's because many Web hosts run their own home page on its own, really fast server, while they run hundreds of their customers' Web sites on slower servers.
To help you figure out which Web host is right for you, the following sections summarize several things that are important to keep in mind as you look.
Price You can find companies offering webhosting for as little as $3/month, or as much as $100 or more/month, depending on what each Web host charges for the services and what features your site needs. Some Web hosts also charge a one-time setup fee of up to $25. If you have more than one Web site, some hosts have plans that allow you to have up to 5 different Web sites in your one account, for just one monthly fee. In the past, I've tried free Web hosts and $6-8/month Web hosts, but I was never happy with their speed, services or support, so now I choose to pay a little more per month and work with a fast, reliable hosting company.
Domain Hosting Domain hosting means that, instead of your Web site having an address that includes your hosting company's name (like www.MyWebHostingCompany.com/MyUserName), your Web site has its own domain name (like ComputerBob.com). Some Web hosts charge extra for domain hosting. Domain hosting (ComputerBob.com) is included in the monthly fee that I pay to host ComputerBob.com.
Domain Name Registration Domain hosting does NOT include the cost of actually renting the domain name that you want (like ComputerBob.com). If you want your own domain name, you'll have to register it with the proper Web authorities. Depending on what company you use to register your domain name, it will generally cost you $5-$40/year for the right to use your domain name. Many Web hosts will charge you a $25-75 processing fee if they fill out your domain registration paperwork for you, while other Web hosts will do it for you for free when you sign up to have them host your Web site. If at all possible, don't have your Web host register your domain name for you. It might seem like they're doing you a favor, but it could end up costing you a lot of trouble or money in the future. The Web is full of horror stories from people whose Web hosts registered their domain names for them. The problem is, a lot of Web hosts will register your domain name for you, but they will list themselves as the owner of the domain name, instead of you, when they fill out the domain registration paperwork. Later, when you try to move your Web site to different Web host, you discover that you can't take your domain name with you, because your old Web host is the legal owner of your domain name. To make matters worse, your old Web hosts may make it extremely difficult for you to transfer your domain name to a new Web host, or they may even charge you a lot of money to "buy" your own domain name back from them. In stark contrast to that scenario, if you register your domain name yourself, and you list yourself as the owner, technical contact, administrative contact, billing contact, etc., then you, and only you, will have total control over your domain name. And you will be able to easily take your domain name with you any time you move your Web site to a different Web host. It may take you an hour's work to figure out how to register your domain name yourself, but, if you choose a good domain registrar (domain registration company) the process is much simpler than it used to be. Add to that the fact that reputable Web hosts are happy to email you the few lines of technical information that you'll need to put in your domain registration application, and reputable domain registrars are happy to help you register your domain name. When I first registered my ComputerBob.com domain name, I did the paperwork myself, and I registered it with the only existing domain registrar at the time, Network Solutions (now called Verisign). They charged me $35/year for my registration, with the first two years ($70) payable in advance. Each time I needed to make a change to my domain information -- like when I moved to a different Web host --I had to find and then fill out Network Solutions' long, confusing forms, submit those forms, and then wait up to 2 weeks for them to add my changes to their domain database. Fortunately, Network Solutions (Verisign) now has many, many competitors who have greatly simplified the domain registration process, and offer much cheaper prices. My current domain registrar is NameCheap. It took less than 2 minutes to transfer my domain registrations, using the onscreen tools on NameCheap's Web site. I pay $8.88/year for my domain name, and, if I change Web hosts, it only takes a few minutes to make the necessary changes to my domain information, using NameCheap's online domain management screens. I chose NameCheap because it is a reseller for eNom.com (one of the biggest domain registrars in the world), so if NameCheap ever goes out of business, eNom.com will still retain my domain registrations. Plus, NameCheap was recommended by many Webmasters at the WebHostingTalk forums, and its low price includes many features, like URL forwarding, the ability to lock my domain name to prevent anyone from stealing it, a feature that hides my email address from spammers, and much more. And because I signed up for NameCheap's optional domain information protection service, my name, address, telephone number, and email address are all completely hidden from spammers in my domain registration records, so I no longer have to pay $38/year to rent a tiny post office box to use as my address in my domain registration records.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: May 7, 2004 -- I used RegisterFly's domain registration service for an entire year, but I found its Web site to be extremely slow, buggy, and user-unfriendly, and its "Live 24/7 Support" to be either totally unavailable or disturbingly uninformed and unhelpful. For example, even after a site redesign that was supposed to speed up the whole RegisterFly site, I still had to wait 45 seconds or longer for each RegisterFly Web page to load, and the site is organized into so many sub-levels that I had to view a lot of other pages in order to get to the ones that I wanted. In addition, I tried to reach RegisterFly's "Live 24/7 Support" on 5 separate occasions, and each time, I waited almost 30 minutes for a support person to show up before finally giving up and disconnecting. Each time I've wrote to RegisterFly to complain, they told me that the fixes to the problems that I reported were going to be installed "next week," but months later, the problems were still not fixed. Finally, I repeatedly found this Web site's domain name "unlocked," even after I repeatedly "locked" it on the RegisterFly site -- a huge security risk that could have allowed someone to "hijack" my domain name by transferring it to a different domain registrar without my permission. As a result of all of those problems, I no longer trusted or wanted to do business with RegisterFly. So, even though my 3 years of RegisterFly's prepaid ProtectFly service on 2 of my domains wasn't due to expire until 2007, I took a loss and transferred all of my domain registrations back to NameCheap, the fast, simple and reliable domain registrar that I used before I switched to RegisterFly.
Web Page Creation Support If you're not an experienced Web site creator, you may appreciate a Web host that offers some type of easy-to-use automatic online Web page creation feature that walks you through the steps of creating a Web site. My current Web host does not offer this feature, but I don't care, because I prefer to use Macromedia Dreamweaver Web creation software.
FrontPage Support If you use Microsoft FrontPage software to create your Web site, you will want to use a Web host whose Web servers are FrontPage enabled, so that your FrontPage hit counters, online forms, and other proprietary FrontPage features will work. Some Web hosts charge extra for FrontPage enabled webhosting. My Web host includes FrontPage support at no extra charge, though I do not use it.
Storage Space Most Web hosts give you at least 10-50MB of storage space for your Web site on their server's hard drive. Unless you're planning to have a large Web site or tons of photographs and audio/video clips on your site, you probably don't have to worry about how much Web space each Web host will give you. To give you a few examples, a Web site of 5-10 pages, with a few graphics or photographs on each page, probably uses a total of less than 2MB of space, while the ComputerBob Web site, with its hundreds of pages and hundreds of graphics and photographs, uses about 75MB of space.
Bandwidth (Monthly Transfer) Each time someone accesses your Web site, they're downloading a certain number of Web pages, pictures, etc. Each of those files takes up some of your Web host's network time and capacity as it is being transferred. That network capacity is commonly known as "bandwidth." Web hosts keep track of how many megabytes of bandwidth your site uses each month, and they either cancel your account or charge you more if your site uses more bandwidth than you paid for. Unless your site is huge or has hundreds of visitors per day, you probably won't need more than 1GB of bandwidth per month. The ComputerBob.com site currently uses less than 2GB of bandwidth per month.
Server and Network Specs Some Web hosts use older computers as servers. While that saves them money, it can cause your Web pages to load slowly if your Web site is being hosted along with several hundred other Web sites on the same slow server. Currently, I've known of Web hosts whose servers have one original Pentium processor running as slow as 400Mhz, with as little as 128MB of RAM memory. Other Web hosts have servers with Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz processors or better, with 4GB or more of RAM. Some Web hosts offer webhosting on servers that run Microsoft server software. Other Web hosts offer webhosting on servers that run UNIX or Linux server software. Usually, you have to pay a little more per month to have your Web site hosted on a Microsoft server, because the Microsoft server software is more expensive and more difficult to configure and maintain, and because it doesn't allow the Web host to have as many users on one server as they could have on a UNIX or Linux server. Also, Microsoft Web servers have traditionally had many more security problems than UNIX or Linux servers. That's why I recommend that you always choose a Web host that runs UNIX or Linux-based Web servers, unless your Web site runs a Microsoft MS SQL database or some other application that specifically requires it to run on a Microsoft-based Web server. If your Web site needs a database, but you would rather not run a Microsoft database on a Microsoft server, many UNIX or Linux Web hosts will provide your Web site with one or more MySQL (UNIX/Linux) databases, often at no additional charge. I use one MySQL database to hold all of the data in ComputerBob's Forums, and another MySQL database to hold all of the data in my User Ratings pages. Getting back to the subject of server specifications, sometimes a highly advertised Web host turns out to be a teenager with a computer running in their basement, connected to a cable modem or a DSL connection that only has the capacity to handle one person's networking needs. If you make the mistake of putting your Web site on that type of server, your Web pages are going to load very slowly, because you'll be sharing the server's network capacity with all of the other Web sites that are hosted on that teenager's computer. Generally speaking, the faster and "more connected" your Web host's server is, the faster and more reliable your Web site will be. My Web host is connected through high-speed routers and protocols to several Tier-1 Internet backbones. If you think of Internet traffic as cars driving all over the world, then the teenager's basement example would be the equivalent of a bike path; many Web hosts are on the equivalent of a two-lane highway, but my current Web host is right at the intersection of several 16-lane superhighways.
NOC! NOC! Who's There? A Network Operations Center (a NOC -- also called a Data Center) is usually a large, very secure building that has many high-speed, high-capacity network connections, and houses many Web servers. A NOC usually also has its own backup electrical power, automated server backup systems, and air conditioning systems. Because it costs millions of dollars to build a NOC, many webhosting companies can't afford their own NOC. Many Web hosts can't even afford to buy own their own Web servers. In fact, many webhosting companies aren't even in the same state as their Web servers! How can that be? Because many webhosting companies consist of just one or two (hopefully knowledgeable) individuals who rent servers that are running in someone else's NOC, and they administer their servers remotely, over the Internet. The webhosting company then rents some of their rented server space to you. A webhosting company that rents its servers from someone else is called a reseller. For the purposes of this article, a company that owns its own servers and either owns or rents space in a NOC is a hosting provider. Because resellers often buy or rent many servers from a hosting provider, they get a huge discount that they can pass on to you. That's why it is cheaper to host your Web site with a reseller than it would be to host it directly with a hosting provider. The disadvantage to hosting with a reseller is that, if you have a tech support problem, your reseller may be the only person running their entire webhosting business, so you may have to wait for them to get around to fixing your problem. Because your reseller's company is often not even in the same city as their hosting provider's servers, your reseller can often end up being a middleman between you and their hosting provider. If your reseller can't figure out what your problem is and fix it on the Web server by remote control over the Internet, or if they determine that something needs to be physically fixed or replaced in a Web server, your reseller has to contact someone who actually works in their hosting provider's NOC and ask them to work on the problem. Then, if the tech support people at the NOC have any questions about your problem, they have to write back to your reseller, who then has to write back to you to ask you the questions, then, after you reply to your reseller, they have to send your answers back to the hosting provider, etc., etc. To get the most for my money, I usually look for a Web host that owns its own servers but rents space for them in a world-renowned datacenter that has 7/24/365 tech support, provided by highly-qualified support professionals.
Beware Of Unlimited Offers Many cheap Web hosts currently claim to offer "unlimited storage" and "unlimited bandwidth." Don't believe them -- there is no such thing as unlimited storage or unlimited bandwidth. Every Web host has to pay for the storage space and bandwidth that they offer to their customers, so a Web host would go bankrupt if it tried to actually offer its users as much storage and bandwidth as they wanted. Unscrupulous Web hosts simply use "unlimited" offers as a marketing trick (lie) to lure users to sign up for their services. The fact is, there's always some fine print in the Web host's service agreement that allows them to cancel the user's account if it uses an "unreasonable" amount of storage or bandwidth, though the service agreement rarely states how much storage or bandwidth the Web host considers to be an "unreasonable" amount. Then, as soon as a user starts actually using whatever unspecified amount of storage that the Web host considers "unreasonable," the Web host suddenly cancels the user's account without warning. For more details, see UnlimBand, an entire Web site devoted to educating people about the dangers of "unlimited" offers.
Beware Of Too-Good-To-Be-True Offers Many Web hosts offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and storage for extremely low prices, like 10GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth for $3.95 per month. Stay away from them. They will go out of business soon, and without warning, taking your money and your Web sites with them. To host a single Web site, expect to pay a reliable Web host $5-10 per month to get 50-100MB of storage and 5-10GB of bandwidth.
Email Addresses Some Web hosts allow you to set up only 1 or 2 POP mail addresses at your domain name. If you need more than that, be sure that your Web host provides them.
Server Location Generally speaking, with all other factors being equal, the closer that you are, geographically, to your Web host's servers, the faster you'll be able to publish your Web site to their servers. On the other hand, a server that is geographically close to you may be geographically far away from your site's visitors, causing your site to load slowly for them. Keep both of those things in mind when you choose a Web host. Don't choose a Web host whose servers are in a different country than you are in, unless you expect that most of the people that visit your site will be in that other country.
Administrator Tools Some Web hosts provide extensive online tools for Web administrators, while others either provide little or no administrator functions. Look for a Web host whose services give you a lot of features, like an administrative control panel (i.e. the popular cPanel) that lets you view your hard disk (storage) quota, view your monthly transfer amount, set up email addresses, change your password, troubleshoot the network, set up a hit counter, protect folders, set up URL redirects, create and configure databases, set up FTP access, configure an email anti-Spam tool, download backups of your site, and and much more..
Technical Support All paid Web hosts provide some type of technical support. Some paid Web hosts do not provide any telephone support at all. Many Web hosts brag about providing great support, but then take 2-3 days to reply to a simple question. You may not need support that is faster than that, but when there is a problem with this Web site, I want support right away. My Web host provides 7/24/365 tech support by email, an online support ticket system, an online knowledgebase, and online support forums. I've written to them several times, and they have always replied knowledgeably and politely, within 1 hour, even in the middle of the night and on a Sunday morning.
Extras Your Web site may or may not need them, but some Web hosts either don't offer them at all, or they charge extra for things like Secure Server, PHP, Perl, SSI, MySQL (database), CGI, formmail, shopping cart and mailing lists.
Read The Fine Print Unfortunately, there are some sleazy Web hosts out there, looking to make a few quick bucks by cheating people. Rochen Hosting, one of my previous Web hosts, had one sentence, hidden deep within several pages of their Terms of Service, that said that all new clients would be charged for six months of service, even if they canceled their account before six months. That's the type of sleazy, self-serving clause that would send any intelligent potential customer running for the door, which I'm sure is why they hid it so well. Not having seen that sentence, I signed up for Rochen Host's service. Almost instantly, I discovered that their reliability and support were both horrible, so I canceled my account about two weeks later. I was shocked to see that Rochen Host continued to bill my credit card every month for 5 more months of Web hosting service. When I complained to my credit card company about those additional charges, Rochen Host showed my credit card company that one sentence, hidden in their Terms of Service. So, they got six months worth of my money, but they've earned a really bad reputation for anyone who reads this article.
Should You Pay Monthly, Quarterly, Semiannually, or Yearly? Many Web hosts give you the option to get a significant discount if you prepay for up to one year of Web hosting. It used to be that if you canceled your account before the end of your prepaid time, those hosts would give you a prorated refund for your unused prepaid services. Unfortunately, many Web hosts now refuse to give you any refund if you cancel your account before you've used all of your prepaid services. That means that if you sign up for a Web host that has that policy, and you pay for one year of service in advance, but then you're unhappy with their service and cancel your account a week later, you won't get any refund for the rest of your prepaid year of service. If you're thinking of prepaying for Web hosting services, be sure you know exactly what your Web host's policies are regarding refunds for prepaid services, and be sure that they promise to notify you in writing if they ever change those policies.
Paid Web Hosts That I Have Used Server101 - I had many problems related to the fact that their servers were located in Australia and I live in the U.S.A. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Server101.
Christian Web Host - I was very happy with their low price and numerous features. I left Christian Web Host after about two years because my ComputerBob Web site was mission-critical to my being able to teach my college students, and CWH could not provide the fast 7/24/365 technical support that I required. Based on my experience with them, I RECOMMEND Christian Web Host to anyone who doesn't have a mission-critical Web site, because they offer a lot of features for the price, and they're very friendly and easy to work with. If he's still there, please tell Lance that ComputerBob says hi.
Aletia Hosting - Luckily, they had a 30-day money back guarantee. I signed up with them because they had been highly rated by many posters at the WebHostingTalk forums in the past. Within a day or two of signing up with them, I sent Aletia tech support a simple question that had not been answered in their online documentation. It took them 36 hours to reply. Unhappy with their lack of support, I canceled my account after only a few days and asked for a refund. They ignored my cancellation request for several days until I finally posted a public message at WebHostingTalk, telling about my situation -- a few hours later, I received email confirmation that Aletia had canceled my account and issued a refund to my credit card. Within a few weeks, a few hundred people had posted messages complaining about Aletia's lack of support, and the problems they had when they tried to cancel their Aletia accounts. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Aletia Hosting.
Rochen Hosting - I canceled my account about two weeks after I switched my domain to their server, because on their server, my Web site seemed to have more downtime than on any Web host I had ever used, and it often took them several hours to reply to my support requests. They seemed to be a very small (one person?) company that had a lot of technical problems and just couldn't keep up with answering their support requests. Then, after I canceled my account, they continued to charge my credit card for another five months. When I first wrote this article, their main Web site was down for so long that I assumed that they had gone out of business. Months later, I learned that they were still in business, but their Web site being down for so long was apparently due to them still having serious technical problems. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Rochen Hosting.
AnimationFX - I left after only a few days, after I received numerous error messages from their FTP server and saw that they were missing entire Web pages in their MySQL (database) configuration program. I got the impression that they were a new hosting company that "wasn't ready for prime time" yet. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND AnimationFX.
Ventures Online - I was with Ventures Online for a year. They provided excellent service and technical support with virtually no problems (pun intended) for only $9.95/month for one Web site/domain. They also offered a $7.95/month hosting package that didn't include any MySQL databases, and more expensive packages that offered even more space and bandwidth. Many Webmasters and resellers in the WebHostingTalk forums have written glowing reports about VO's fast servers, fast network, and excellent tech support. Based on my experience with them, I RECOMMEND Ventures Online to both beginners and experienced Webmasters.
CredibleHost - I was with CredibleHost for a less than a week. Their reseller plans had a lot of features, and were competitively priced, but their reliability and tech support were both horrible. Though CredibleHost employs a few part-timers, they have only one full-time system administrator, so I consider CredibleHost to be a very risky one-person operation. For example, the server that my sites were on crashed before my sites even had time to start working, and it took the lone systems administrator 40 hours to get that server going again. After 36 hours with no Web sites and no email, I moved my sites back to my previous webhost, but I kept checking the CredibleHost support forums to see how things were going. A few days after that server was finally running again, its datacenter shut it down on purpose for several days for investigation and to rebuild it, because hacker scripts were found in one of its folders. According to users' messages in CredibleHost's support forums, server downtimes, email downtimes, hacker attacks, slow tech support, and long-term problems that go unsolved are disturbingly common at CredibleHost. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND CredibleHost.
Dathorn - Many Webmasters and resellers in the WebHostingTalk forums have written glowing reports about Dathorn, and their reseller packages were very tempting; however, after they gave me rude and evasive answers to my simple pre-sales questions, I decided that I will never give them my business. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND Dathorn.
FluidHosting - I was with FluidHosting for more than 13 months. Their price/features were very fair, their datacenter and network were both world-class, and their support and reliability were both excellent. In all the time that I was with them, I don't think my sites ever had even one unscheduled downtime. The only reason I left FluidHosting was because I wanted a reseller account, and even FluidHosting's cheapest one was way out of my budget. Based on my experience with them, I RECOMMEND FluidHosting to both beginners and experienced Webmasters.
BitstreamHosting - I had my webhosting reseller account with BitstreamHosting for about 1 month. Their price/features were very fair, their datacenter and network were both world-class, and their support and reliability were both good -- for a little more than 2 weeks after I joined them. Then, for some unexplained reason, their support suddenly became nonexistent, and complaints from their clients piled up for almost 2 weeks without any responses. I suspect that Bitstream is a 1 or 2-person operation, and something probably happened to those 1 or 2 people. I didn't want to wait for Bitstream's problems to affect my clients and me, so I quickly moved my reseller account to Bright-Byte (see below). Several days after I had used Bitstream's online Member Account Center to cancel my account, my cancellation was still listed there as PENDING. When I went back to check the BitstreamHosting support forums after I had canceled my account, I saw that BitstreamHosting had deleted 2 weeks worth of complaints and cancellation notices from their many angry users -- a practice that I believe is extremely unscrupulous. Based on my experience with them, I DO NOT RECOMMEND BitstreamHosting.
BliksemHosting - I had a reseller account with BliksemHosting for less than one week in late December, 2005. Even though my clients' and my Web sites used less than 1/5 of the storage space that I had paid for, and in an entire month would have used less than 1/15 of the monthly transfer that I had paid for, someone named "Jav" (pronounced "Hahv") from Bliksem called me at home to tell me that I should probably find a different Web host because he didn't like the "tone" of a support ticket that I had opened. The support ticket in question was actually a very polite one, in which I told them that SpamAssassin was still running even after I had turned it off in my Web site's control panel. After scolding me for not understanding his cryptic responses to my support ticket, Jav told me that I was also in danger of violating Bliksem's Terms of Service because my reseller account was sending out far more email messages than any of the other 800 accounts on their server. I asked him to please explain what could possibly cause that problem, because I know for a fact that my clients and I together never send out more than a total of 20 email messages per day. He refused to give me any details, but told me that he knows more about running a server than I do, so I should trust him. He was so full of himself that he barely allowed me to even say more than a few words at a time. No matter how long I stayed silent and let him talk, sometimes for a minute or two at a time, he scolded me like a small child for interrupting him every single time I tried to say anything. When I asked him to clarify his cryptic responses to my SpamAssassin support ticket questions, he insisted on reading every single word of my support ticket and all of his responses out loud to me. As he read them out loud, he made sarcastic comments, such as "See, Robert, right there was the fourth time that we explained the same thing to you, but you still refused to understand." When I repeatedly tried to tell him that his responses hadn't made any sense to me, he sternly scolded me again for interrupting him, and continued reading out loud. When he finally finished reading to me, I was able to tell him that his reponses hadn't made any sense to me and hadn't even come close to answering my questions. Then, I started to try to explain why that was, but he immediately "talked over me," saying things like, "Well, when we wrote that response, we assumed that someone who calls himself "ComputerBob" would know more than you know, but you obviously know nothing about administering a Linux Web server that has over 800 users." Though Jav continued to insult me, and obviously had absolutely no interest in hearing anything that I had to say, I kept trying to win him over to be my friend. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, he continued to "talk over me," accused me of interrupting him, and refused to let me finish even one sentence. Mostly out of morbid curiosity, but also to gather evidence for this article, I allowed him to completely dominate the conversation for an entire hour. Even I have my limits, though, so I finally gave up and hung up my phone very quietly in the middle of one of his pontifications. In fact, he's probably still scolding me right now, happy that I'm no longer interrupting him, and totally oblivious to the fact that I hung up on him more than 6 hours ago. I DO NOT RECOMMEND BliksemHosting.
UPDATE, July 5, 2006: I just received an email message that confirms that Bliksemhosting's customer service skills are still just as bad as they were for me more than six months ago:
Hi Bob,
I just wanted to say thank you for what you have written on your site about Bliksemhosting. I live in Australia, and last night at 4am - I too received a phone call from Jav.
My tone of my support tickets was inappropriate also. I asked him politely to call back in a couple of hours and we can talk about it. His only response? "You have 24 hours to remove your data and get off his servers". In the days preceeding there were some catestrophic HDD failures on the server I am on, and I was asking some fairly detailed technical questions as to why. I didn't know his name was 'Hahv'. In fact, at 4am the only name I feel like calling someone isnt exactly correct - politically or otherwise. I called him 'Jav'. (Don't make that mistake)
I left the phone call feeling so angry. Angry at being woken at that time, as well as annoyed that my email had been deemed as 'offensive'. I very carefully worded it to ensure there was no finger-pointing, but he resorted to that.
I appreciate what you wrote. I was feeling as if I had done/said something wrong, but from your site, and many many other forums I am not the only person to cop the abuse either.
Thanks :)
Andrew
Bright-Byte - I had a reseller account with Bright-Byte from May, 2004 until late October, 2006 (except for one week in December, 2005, that I tried Bliksemhosting). During that 2 /12 years, they hosted my Web sites and the Web sites of my clients. Bright-Byte's reseller accounts cost more than similar reseller accounts from BitstreamHosting or CredibleHost, but Bright-Byte provided great speed and reliability, and it had 7 full-time tech support people who provided outstanding 7/24/365 support. Unfortunately, Bright-Bytes support seemed to go downhill over time. When I first joined Bright-Byte, they seemed grateful when I reported and then helped them troubleshoot problems with their services. Unfortunately, their attitude changed over time. In the last several months before I left Bright-Byte, it seemed like I had to spend a lot of time trying to convince them that problems existed before they were willing to finally make an effort to solve them. The last straw -- and the reason that I left Bright-Byte -- came after they did an update to the "cPanel" administrative software on their servers. Afterward, I couldn't login to the cPanel of any of my accounts. When I opened a support ticket for the problem, they told me "You're the only one who's complaining about that problem." Despite the fact that I spent several hours giving them more details about the symptoms of the problem to try to convince them to solve it, it took them 12 hours to finally apply what turned out to be a 5-minute fix for the problem, because they waited until another client finally told them that they were having the same problem. After that, I wrote to Bright-Byte and told them that I believed that they owed me an apology for the dismissive and patronizing way that they had treated me. Two weeks later, they still hadn't replied, so I wrote to them again, to remind them that I had not received an apology. At that point, they politely apologized for the fact that they had failed to solve the technical problem quickly, but they didn't even mention the rude way that they had treated me. That same day, I decided to move to BliksemHosting (see below). Several days later, after I canceled my Bright-Byte account, I received another apology from Bright-Byte, saying, "The patronizing and insulting manner that you refer to may be due to the fact that English isn't one of the support techs (sic) first language and this could be why it appeared as above, please rest assured it was not their intention." I wrote back to tell them that if they had told me that 2 1/2 weeks earlier, I might not have canceled my accounts and moved to a different Web host. As things turned out, I returned to Bright-Byte after trying Bliksemhosting for just one week (see above), and stayed with Bright-Byte until October, 2006 (see below)
UPDATE, October 28, 2006: During the past week, I had several problems with Bright-Byte's web hosting. Their online payment system would allow me to login, but it wouldn't allow me to pay my monthly hosting fee with my credit card as I had done for the past 2 1/2 years. When I would try to pay, it would tell me that my shopping cart was empty. To me, it was obvious that the problem lay in the interface between Bright-Byte's billing page and the 2Checkout.com billing service that they utilize to collect their hosting fees. When I described the symptoms of the problem to them in great detail, their only response was to change my login password. From that point on, I couldn't even login to their billing page any more, let alone use it to pay for my monthly hosting fee. When I brought that to their attention, Bright-Byte's new owner wrote a patronizing reply to me, telling me that the support tech who had changed my password had done "the best he could" to solve the problem. When I replied that it appeared to me that the tech hadn't even bothered to read my lengthy, detailed support ticket, in which I described exactly what the problem was, Bright-Byte's new owner's replies got really rude and dismissive. He angrily accused me of trying to tell him how to run his business, how to collect his company's hosting fees, and how to deal with his employees. To make a long story short(er), more than two days after I had reported that Bright-Byte's online billing system wouldn't allow me to pay my monthly hosting fee, the problem still existed, and Bright-Byte's owner appeared to have little interest in solving it. In the meantime, I was afraid that Bright-Byte would terminate my account and shut down my web sites if I didn't pay them right away. Plus, because they had done something wrong when they had unecessarily changed my account password, I still couldn't even login to their billing page. To make matters worse, Bright-Byte's new owner rudely expressed his frustration at me several times, instead of solving the problems. I felt like he was treating me like I was bothering him, and I was a huge inconvenience, instead of a valued customer. As his replies got ruder, it was apparent to me that I was probably goint to have to find a new web host, so I decided to request a payment of the affiliate fees that I had earned in the past few months of being a Bright-Byte affiliate, so that if I decided to leave Bright-Byte, I would already have the money that they owed me:
Me: Bright-Byte's Affiliate Program Account Management screen states the following: "Receiving A PayPal Payment From Us Is Optional. If you choose not to receive PayPal payments from us, we'll send you a paper check in the mail." I currently have a balance of $50 in my Bright-Byte affiliate account, but I do not have a PayPal account. Please mail a paper affiliate payment check in the amount of $50 as soon as possible. Afterward, please send me an email confirmation that you have mailed the check to me. Thank you.
Bright-Byte: Dear XXXXXXXXX, You Have a Pending Payment. BBCSNetwork just sent you a payment with PayPal. Payment is sent by PayPal. I'm not writing you a check.
Me: Your web site says you will send me a paper check. I have requested that you send me a paper check. I expect you to honor the terms that you state on your web site.
Bright-Byte: Payment has been sent by PayPal. Take it or leave it. Check the site again.
(I didn't bother to check the Bright-Byte site again, but apparently, he wanted me to see that he had just changed the stated payment terms on the Bright-Byte's Affiliate Program Account Management screen to which I had referred.)
Me: You are an unethical person. I made it very clear to you a few days ago that I have no interest in opening a PayPal account, yet you insist on paying me by that method, even though Bright-Byte's web site said that you would send me a paper check.
Bright-Byte: No I'm not unethical. I paid you what you are owed. It's your decision to take it or leave it. Please take your business elsewhere. Do not contact me again. If you slander or libel Bright Byte in any way, I will file suit against you. Good bye.
When I read his last response, I suddenly started worrying that he might shut down my sites, disable my email accounts, or take some other type of retaliatory action against me. So, even though I had been awake nearly all night, dealing with him and the fact that I still couldn't even login to Bright-Byte's billing page, I spent the next 17 hours finding a new web host and moving my sites to it. Though I recommended Bright-Byte hosting in the past, and I even signed up for its affiliate program a few months ago, my opinion drastically changed in the last week that I dealt with Bright-Byte's new owner before I left Bright-Byte. I had a good relationship with Bright-Byte's previous owner for about 2 1/2 years, and I believe that he would be ashamed of his company's new owner's behavior. I DO NOT RECOMMEND Bright-Byte.
UPDATE, May 14, 2008: I received an email message from Bright-Byte today. Its title was "Client Notifier-Overdue by 90 days." The message itself said "This is a notice to inform you that your account with bright-byte.com has an overdue balance. You have one or more invoices that are overdue by 90 days or more. Your account will be deleted from the server in 48-72 hours. Below are the account and invoice details:..."
I sent the following reply to that message: "You have made a mistake. I cancelled my account with Bright-Byte in October, 2006. Please correct your records and do not bother me again."
The Web Host That I Use Now Since October 26, 2006, I have been using FluidHosting's web hosting services. I had been very happy with their services for more than a year, a few years ago. See my review of them, above. Instead of having a reseller account with each of my domains having its own separate control panel, I have a normal, shared-hosting account, but it allows me to host multiple domains, all under one umbrella control panel. Since I am the only person who administers the domains that I host, that works out well for me, and even though it costs me significantly more than what I had paid for web hosting in the past, it saves me a lot of money, compared to the cost of FluidHosting's true reseller accounts.
Check Out Any Potential Host Yourself Before you seriously consider signing up with any Web host, including those that I recommend, be sure to go to the sites listed in the Finding A Good Paid Web Host section above, and do a search for that host's name, to make sure that its reputation is still as good as it was when I recommended it. The reason I say that is because I've seen Web hosts get glowing reviews from people at one or more sites, and then a few months later, people at those same sites are complaining that the hosts' services and support have slipped to substandard levels, usually as a result of getting many new customers too quickly for their hardware and/or support staff to be able to adequately handle them.
After you find a Web host that is currently highly rated by other users at WebHostingTalk, there are some other things that you can do to check out a potential Web host. First of all, if you're interested in a particular web host because someone recommended them to you, then check out the credibility of the person who gave you the recommendation by visiting their web site. Does it load quickly, without delays? Does it look large and professional or is it just one amateurish-looking page? Does their site include links to independent, third-party site-uptime checking services, like the ones that you see in this site's left navigation column? If so, click on those uptime links and see how reliable their web host's service has been over the past year or longer. Uptime should be within a few hundredths of a percent of 100% at all times. Remember, even though 99.0% uptime sounds like it would be really good, a web host that has uptime of 99.0% has downtime of 7.2 hours every month. Would you be happy if your web site was down for 7.2 hours every month? If the recommending person's site looks amateurish, or if they don't provide any links to independent uptime statistics, then that might mean that the person whose site it is doesn't really know what they're doing. Maybe they recommended their web host to you simply because it's the web host that they use, instead of because it's a really good web host. Keep in mind that there are thousands of people out there recommending their own web hosts simply because they get a commission each time someone signs up for that web host. Or maybe even because they own or work for the web hosting company that they're recommending. By checking out their web site and its uptime, you'll learn to recognize and "weed-out" those types of biased recommendations.
Check the potential hosting company's Web site, to see if it looks professional or amateurish. If it looks amateurish, that's a dead giveaway that something is wrong. On the other hand, don't be fooled into thinking that it's a good web hosting company just because its web site looks professional. Many professional web hosting companies provide professional-looking web pages for their web hosting clients to use free of charge, so any kid who runs a web hosting business out of his parents' basement can steal and use a professional-looking web page to help them fool you into using their services. In fact, if you visit 10-20 different web hosting companies' web sites, you'll start to recognize that many of them have the exact same professional look; often with the exact same photograph of a friendly looking woman who's waiting to sign you up for their services. If I were you, I'd stay away from those web hosting companies.
If a potential web hosting company makes it to this point in your shopping process, then become a registered user of their forums and then read some of the users' questions and complaints in those forums. The reason you have to become a registered user of their forums is because some webhosts hide their complaint forums from the general public, so you won't see any complaints unless you become a registered user of their forums. If a lot of users complain that their problems aren't being resolved in a reasonable amount of time, then you may want to avoid using that Web host. If you don't see any complaints, it may be an indication that that particular Web host's clients are happy, or it may be an indication that that particular Web host deletes any complaints that it finds in its support forums (an unscrupulous practice that many Web hosts do). That's why it is important that you do more than just check a potential Web host's support forums before making your decision. If you are satisfied with what you learn from the potential Web host's support forums, then think of a couple of questions that you'd like answered about that host's prices or services. Then send them a couple of email messages with your questions, to see how quickly, knowledgeably, and politely they reply to you. If you have other questions resulting from their replies, then write to them again. It's extremely important to "try out" any potential Web host in that manner. If you're not happy with the replies that they send you when they're trying to win you over as a customer, then you probably wouldn't be happy with the replies that they would send you when you're their paying customer.
Bottom line: do your research and make sure that any Web host that you're considering is currently still as good or better than past reviews or recommendations of it have indicated. As you can see by my experiences with several web hosts in the past, there are many bad web hosts out there, and there are many things that can suddenly or gradually turn a good web host into a bad one, so be prepared to quickly move your web site(s) to a different web host any time it becomes necessary.
Conclusion The moral of the story is that, whether it's time and trouble, or inconvenience, or money, webhosting is always going to cost you something, but if you're smart and do your homework, you can find the best webhosting solution for your needs.