With our combined experience over the years, we have seen the best and worst of web hosting companies.  He’s a light hearted but rather jaded list of reasons web hosts SUCK!

1. Calling into customer support and waiting on hold for 40 minutes and the hold music is Marilyn Manson!

2. You ask for RoR (Ruby on Rails) and the tech on the phone assures you he can provide that and yells “RWAAAAR”

3. Your hosting company just got bought out by a web hosting company you just transferred away from.

4. They claim to be a member of the BBB but later you find out their BBB is The Birmingham Bizarre Bazaar (quality fetish suppliers).

5. You call in tech support and a gentleman with an Indian accent says “Sir is your computer plugged in?” .. and you’re a woman

6. You sign up for domain privacy and later do a WHOIS and see your credit card information and SS number.  “I was told I would get domain privacy!” “Miss we thought you requested domain piracy” .. and you’re a man.

7. You ask the tech if he has a TOS and he says yes.  You later find out he meant totally offensive smells and your site has been suspended unexpectedly, you have no leg to stand on and the tech’s response is “Oh THAT TOS!”

8. The same tech who told you he has backups on your pre sales call turns out to be a wannabee singer and his “backups” are his 12 year old twin sisters who “doowup” when he busts a move in the bathroom.

9. You ask him how big his file size limit is and he responds “That’s kinda personal.. but what I can tell you is I leave the ladies smiling”.

10. The same tech (let’s call him Hubert since there’s a whole theme happening here) answers yes to your questions regarding shared server offerings.  You later find out that Hubert is a very giving and generous guy and he “shares” your server space, bandwidth allocation and resources with all the clients hosting on the same server as you… along with your personal information and email address!

11. When you ask Hubert how long they have been in business his response of 15 years reassures you that they are a legit and solid company.  When you phone in to challenge this as their whois says 2006 he replies “Ohhhh I thought we were talking DOG years!”

12. When your server goes down right before a big marketing campaign goes out.

13. Calling into support to ask a question and the rep cannot find your account because somehow it got deleted OOPS!

14. Your host asks you to verify your account by repeating your password over the phone.  Every time you say it, you hear a stifled giggle and they say “I’m sorry sir can you please repeat that?”  Your password is IamTheBe$tLOVER

15. Your web host has automated support.  After 23 minutes of keying in your SS number, last 6 digits of your credit card and your domain name (37 characters) you finally speak with a real person who requests the SAME information AGAIN!

16. After cancelling your hosting account you are continually getting billed but now for 2 dedicated servers instead of your $100 a year hosting account.

17. After 36 straight hours of working on your new sites web design and meticulously putting every image in its place you find out that your server crashed and there is no backup. NOOOOOOO!!!

18. Getting a deal on your first year and then having to renew at a more expensive price.

19. You have never been on the internet before and you decide to buy a hosting account and setup an email account through them. Within 20 minutes you already have spam!!!!!

20. Your host experiences power failure and they have no backup generators!

21. When you call your hosting company and ask why your servers went down.  They respond with “No they didn’t.  It must be a propagation issue or something with your ISP”

22. You call support because your site is down and they say “We are going through an upgrade”. That works once but when it happens every week sporadically during the middle of the day and they keep saying “it’s an update to help better serve you” SUUUUCKS!!!!

23. Your hosting company has a problem with spam and the filter is up so high that no mail is getting through but when you are in a meeting and check your mail all there is in your inbox is porn spam and everyone is looking at you like you’re a sicko.

24. Every time you go to your website it’s down but when other people go to it, it’s fine. Sometimes you will sit your friend down at his computer and you at yours and you phone conference each other to see if it comes up and it does for him but not for you. You decide to go to his house and he to yours and see if it’s just your home computer but wherever you go your website will not be displayed. SUCKYVOODOONESS!!!

25. You call your web host support team because something is wrong with your site and they tell you that a widget 2.0 socket 5 cloud storm hit their data center and that’s why a page got deleted.  IDIOT SUCKFEST!!

26. After many attempts of being patient with your web hosting customer support techs inability to fix any problem you get frustrated and a little upset. Later that day you find the following things wrong with your site.

• Your real estate site is unexpectedly not selling real estate anymore. You are selling liquor stores now.
• You just put up a very professional picture of yourself on your site and the next thing you know someone photo shopped your photo with a mustache, a black eye and teeth missing.

27. When you bought your website and domain name through a sales rep at your first hosting company the hosting company used the CEO’s name to register your domain name. Now you want to leave but they own your domain name. TRICKY WEB HOSTY!!!

28. You bought a hosting account through a template hosting agency because you don’t know html and their backend admin area looks cool. After you purchase this you find out that they don’t support their templates!

29. You are talking to smooth salesman Timmy over at a hosting company and he promises you 4 add-on’s, forum management, bulletin management, Free email marketing and a 200 Google adwords credit. After you sign up for their premier account for 5 grand a year you notice that the freebies are not included in your package. You call back for Timmy but no one knows who Timmy is and a “Timmy” has not worked for them EVER!

30. You do not have log files!

31. Your log files are never accurate.

32. You started a lead generation site where people fill out forms for products/servers/newsletters and in return you get there email addresses. Someone decides to give your site a virus and take over your mailing list and your web host cannot do anything about it.

33. Your built in traffic stats never work.

34. Your built in traffic stats are always off.

35. You purchase a large hosting account with a lot of extras but when you need small things done you are nickeled and dimed till you are broke.

36. Your hosting company charges you to park domains.

37. You buy a hosting account with a ton of space but cannot put up multiple sites on it.

38. The only way you can put up multiple sites on your account is via your .htaccess file but you have no freaking clue how to do that and your web host does not support that. GREAT that’s awesome good work!!!!

39. You actually love your hosting company because it’s a smaller no name company but the service is great. You tell all of your 5 friends to join and they do and their servers are overloaded.

40. You sign up for a web host by doing a Google search and after you sign up you call their support line but find out they are a foreign hosting company in Germany and all there support techs speak German.

41. You sign up with your web host but you only get 1 MYSQL database.

42. Your web hosting company is in charge of sending you notification on domain name expiration but you never get yours. Your domain expires.

43. A cyber squatter picked up your domain name and is holding it hostage. You find out it’s the guy from your web hosting companies support team who you previously screamed at and called a stupid moron.

44. You utilize a free web hosting service but they place ads all over your page.

45. Your hosting company has backup servers but they are in the same geographical location so when the power goes off the original servers go down AND the back up’s go down.

46. Your hosting company cannot automate its billing and invoices and its all done by hand.  Sadly, the accounts guy was recently paralyzed in a freak server accident and types by blowing into a straw.

47. Your web host goes “down” for 24 hour periods at a time.

48. Your user control panel consists of 2 options. On and Off!

49. You need redirection for your ASP site and when you call to make sure they can support it the sales-guy happily announces they can but when it comes time to implement it the only advice they can give is to hit the forums where you discover that you just need to edit a couple files.  Files they don’t support.

50. They offer SSH on shared servers and your site is constantly OWNED by 12 year old hackers.

51. They advertise domains for under $2 but when you complete the purchase your charge says $98?

52. You request support and they advise you support costs extra!

53. You request a CPanel them change and they escalate your request to a System Admin!

54. They don’t tell the truth. They claim a lot of services that when you host with them, you find out they don’t offer.  Like bandwidth, they’ll claim to provide x amount of bandwidth, then you find out they have a daily cap for using it and when you multiply the daily cap x 30 or 31, it is about 1/2 the size of the bandwidth they claim to provide monthly.

55. canceling – they’ll claim they let you cancel anytime within the contract, but it turns out you can’t ever get a refund (you have to write a letter in your own blood to prove you are who you say you are, then send it to their office in Nome, Alaska that reads mail only once a year during the famous dog sled race). Of course, when you complain about these points, they point you to their TOS where it spells out the whole Nome and dog sled stuff, although it doesn’t mention the writing the letter in your own blood (the person on the phone just made that up to be funny).

56. When immediately after you sign up with them, they offer this great deal on more space/bandwidth/whatever…but you can’t get it because you are already a customer.

57. EVERYTHING is an extra charge, and you feel like you are getting nickle/dimed to death.

58. You get treated like you just won the “Imbecile of the Year” award. (Even if you do deserve that award, being treated that way is not nice.)

59. They pretend to help but can’t speak English….only geekspeak. And they refuse to repeat or explain any further.

60. They don’t have a community forum!!!

Senator Brownback Hosts Commercial Spaceflight Event With Norm Augustine
Kansas Senator Inviting Others To Discuss The Issue The Commercial Spaceflight Federation says that Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), the former Chair of the Senate Science and Space Subcommittee, will be hosting an event for his Senate colleagues and their staff on Thursday to discuss commercial spaceflight.

Read more on The Aero-News Network

In the current event of time, some web hosts are offering additional features compare to others to the clients for the same price or even for a lower price. One cannot deny the fact that as due to cut – throat competition in the market several hosting providers are trying desperately to stay outstanding by adopting various methods. As a consequence, the web hosting service standards improved a lot and constantly is on verge of rising and evidently the clients are constantly enjoying the taste of amazing new features that were previously not there. Given below are the few things, which some web hosts frequently offer to their clients.

1.) Due to competitive market scenario website hosts are coming forward to assist the clients in the purpose of publishing and managing their own email newsletters or eZines. It is one of the most effective marketing weapons that promote sales. But some hosts go two-step forward by offering an infinite amount of auto responders. This assists a site owner automatically to pursue with prospects and therefore probability of making sale become significantly higher.

2.) In the contemporary era of time one can easily get the facility of hosting services that assists him/her to set up one’s own affiliate program which is verified to be the most successful route to grab traffic and profits for webmasters. There are several good sites like Amazon.com, which enables other website owners to promote their site and products on their site and in return can earn commissions from the sales that result from traffic that they have referred to one’s site as well.

3.) If one talks about the third most popular feature then it will probably be the service provided by the host to the users to protect their download page where the user is selling digital products for e.g. e-books, software etc. from his/her site. As in the current time period increasing number of hackers is a contentious issue and such sort of services definitely going to act as a pain killer for many webmasters.

4.) A few hosting services are also taking into account the hastily increasing threat of junk mail and offer quality filters to protect one’s email accounts. A few hosting providers even provide built-in anti-virus software in order that email that come to the inbox of the user along with the company of viruses, is automatically deleted.

Thus, above mentioned are the extra services, which hosts provide to the client. Thus, one can rightly say that,” The war between two, benefit the third party”.

One usually thinks that he/she will receive same services with the certain range of price, which type of host it doesn’t matter. This is not a fact. Basically, one will not find differences in the web hosting but if one will carefully analyze there will be a vast difference between each one of them. Some of which are not adequate to user’s business. There are several hosts charging $10 a month for a particular package which one can get at the rate of $5a month with other hosting provider.

Mentioned below are 3 of the steps following which one can end up on an ideal hosting selection.

1. Deciding one’s Price range:

Price is the top most concern. One can spend anything to meet his/her requirements ranging from a few dollars a month to a few hundred. There is no one but the user who knows about his/her requirement and about his/her budget. One should consider it. Here one should find providers offering shared and dedicated hosting solutions. It is quite crucial to know the actual disparity among the two. Normally, it is shared web hosting is more inexpensive as compare to dedicated hosting. In the case of shared hosting their will be several web sites on the same server making it quite affordable for each individual.

Due to this reason only a large amount of individuals and businesses began with shared hosting and its reliability and consistency is increasing day by day due to which several businesses have raised on the basis of price and reliability. One can get web hosting prices generally in the range of $5 to $30 a month. If one will talks about Dedicated hosting then the user will have all the right to exploit entire resources. User will command the web server according to the available resources. When it comes to this type of hosting it will differ in both the price and services. It can be from $99 a month to a huge amount of $300-$400 a month. Certainly, here one will enjoy a reliable service and command over content and customization area.

2. Deciding one’s Needs:

What is the requirement of the user? However, one cannot deny the fact that web hosting has become quite affordable and competitive over the last few years but one should first search out the answers of few of the basic questions. Is user’s requirement is the 100% uptime i.e. 24/7/365 or just the modest uptime i.e. 99.9% which one can find at a cheap price as per the standardization of industry in comparison to a SLA (Service Level Agreement). What is user are Criteria regarding support? Does the requirement is 24/7/365 email support or in addition to it phone support? Loss of potential data is a topic which is quite crucial but generally overlooked by the user. Does user should ensure that his/her web host offers back up / restore services or rather an option to ad it or which one can buy on additional cost. Several user’s take it easy as it is automatic but one should mind it that without proper inquiry and involvement in the package it is not going to be accomplish. Requirement of quantity of email accounts and databases can be the other criteria. If the user possesses employees then the probability is that they would like individual email accounts for the use in interoffice and external communication. While user is opting for a strategy to run an e-commerce shopping cart or rather a community forum of any sort then requirement of one or more databases is must.

Normally, email accounts are standard but several hosts demands additional amount for databases and/or limit as per their business structure. Next, important aspect is the amount of disk space and data transfer required by the user? Now a day’s disk space and data transfer are available quite cheap. It is the Performance, features, reliability, and customer service for which the user is paying. For instance, if in the future user feels requirement of graphics resulting in large data base then it is not bad to have much disk space in advance because user may not feel its importance in beginning but it can be fruitful with respect to future strategy.

3. Accomplishing one’s Homework:

After considering above steps one should go for the research mode. The step deals with the outlook of providers. User should start his/her research from host’s own web site. The web site of several companies has a section called “about us” through which one can inquire about their background/history and a synopsis regarding their products, services, infrastructure etc. one should also go through their terms and policies regarding privacy and service. No doubt, one should be aware of the depth of the lake in which he/she is diving into. This is because several problems may arise later on if the user do not have the in depth knowledge of his/her concern host. By going through these policies one may have insight knowledge on restrictions between providers and which direction one should proceed by avoiding any trouble as per changing scenario. There are several companies delivering a customer testimonial and FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page in addition to it. User can consider Testimonials as a source of providing useful information about kinds of web sites being hosted and the way the company is delivering services to its present customers. If FAQ page delivered by the company is accurate then one can solve majority of problems in a very simple manner, whether the problem is related to sales or technical doesn’t matter. Certainly, one of the crucial ways to conclude research on the concern host is to charge them with questions/need which may not be apparently answered.

Thus at the end we can say that there are literally hundreds of specific needs that any one company or individual requires while searching for web hosting services. The problems and solutions are so much that even a book can be written on it. Thus the above given is a fundamental foundation of steps that will help user in beginning with good success.

The one who wants to enter in this web world and desires for a long time survival, then he/she should be familiar with each and every terminology used in this field. If user considers all the important factors before choosing a hosting plan then only he/she will be able to have a successful future in this world .User should not choose any of the plan, rather he/she should opt the best and most suitable one and this can only be made possible by fetching more and more informations and also by studying properly all the requirements. New comers should start from the basics .They should learn the meaning of each and every term used and also in addition those factors that can affect his/her selection.

Web Host

Web host refers to a computer connected to the internet. Web host can also be termed as ‘web server’. The computer that is playing the role of the web server needs to be more powerful than normal PCs and the function of this web server is to serve up websites.

The website content of the user will remain will on this computer, so as the people who are surfing on the internet can get a way to access his/her website.

There can be three main categories in which the web host can be classified based on the economic factor and common features:

1. Free Hosts:

The users who are not professional but are making website only as a hobby then for them free hosting can be a good option. In free hosting space, bandwidth and other features provided are very limited. With free web hosting one can not only make his/her website successful but is also suitable for personal websites or for temporary usage. Generally free hosting enforces pop-up, text or banner ads. Reliability, best performance and customer support lacks in case of free hosting as well. When a user registers for a free host then the word free host gets added with the user’s domain name that gives an adverse effect in the eye of the visitors.

2. Shared Hosts:

The next type of the web hosting to be discussed is shared hosting. This hosting service is used by many of the web sites .This type of hosting service is Suitable for personal, small and medium businesses. This service can be used by paying $1 to $25 per month. The features provided by this service vary from very limited space/bandwidth to semi-dedicated servers. The users host their website by this type of hosting service and it has its own top level domain facility. No doubt that shared web hosting is quite better than free hosting but still it does not provide 100% satisfactory services. In case of shared hosting one server is shared by the number of websites so its performance and availability gets affected. More websites usually means less performance. If less number of websites are hosted by one server then it will be more expensive, but in this case there are more chances of reliability. There are many companies allowing customers to host multiple websites with different domains under a single account.

3. Dedicated Hosts:

The next type of hosting is dedicated hosting. This type of hosting is most reliable hosting. In this type of hosting a full server is dedicated to a single customer. Generally this type of hosting is used by large businesses, professionals and very active websites dealing with thousands of visitors daily. The customers having dedicated hosting can have their total control over the server as well as able to create as many websites as they like. Customers can run their own hosting company on a rented dedicated server. Payment module is mentioned according to specifications and services provided with the server, which varies from $100 up to about $800 dollars per month.

4. Collocated Hosts:

Now the other type of hosting service to be discussed is collocated hosting. This service is very much similar to dedicated hosting. The difference between collocated hosting and dedicated hosting is that in collocated hosting the customer owns the server hardware instead of renting it. In this service the server will be placed in provider’s data center. This service is more expensive than dedicated hosting.

5. Reseller Hosts:

In reseller hosting the providers offers web server storage to their customers, and resells the web server storage to them. Generally providers offer resellers a discount price.

6. Other Hosts:

Including the above type of hosts there are also many other hosts such as email hosts, media hosts, data hosts, etc but these hosts will not be discussed in this article.

Domain Name

Domain name is the name which shows the place where one’s website is located. The actual address of the website is a set of numbers. Each and every web server has its own unique address. Domain name indicates the real addresses of every websites. One can easily remember the domain name of any of the website. Remembering domain name is easier than recalling the IP addresses.

Space / Storage

Space is one of the services provided by the web host. It plays a very important role in the website development. It happens many times that the customer requires more space but the host fails to provide it, so customer should be very careful while choosing the web host. Storage is the amount of web server’s disk space available for customer’s website files, images and databases. Space can be according to the requirement; it can be as small as 5MB in some free hosts and as big as 300GB for some dedicated servers. Earlier prices of the space were very high but prices reduced significantly during the last few years. The hosting plans offering 3GB of space for less than $10 a month can be easily available.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth can be defined as the amount of data transferred from web server to clients’ internet browsers. When ever a person outlook a page the data is transmitted from the server to that person’ PC. If any one is having audio, video and images in his/her website then the bandwidth consumed is more in comparison of the website having only text contents. The bandwidth available in free hosting can be as low as 100MB per month where as in some dedicated servers the bandwidth available is as high as 2000GB a month. The customers who don’t want to pay more for bandwidth can easily find hosting plans offering 75GB of monthly data transfer for less than $10.

Server Type

Generally server means the operating system than runs the web server. Some common types are Windows, Linux and UNIX. Server type refers the server side scripting and database types. The difference between Windows server and Linux/UNIX is that Windows runs ASP and ASP.NET with Access or SQL Server databases where as Linux/UNIX servers usually runs CGI, PHP or JSP with MySQL or Oracle databases. The other difference is that Windows servers are more expensive than Linux/UNIX servers.

Databases

As server type is discussed earlier also, we are able to know that there are different types of databases available. The mostly used is MySQL as it is open source GPL (free) software and can serve a lot of online applications’ requirements such as forums, content management, mailing lists, etc. MySQL, rather its features are limited. MySQL is sufficient for small concern but it is not powerful for the complicated large business sites. Large business requires more powerful databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.

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Server Side Scripting

Usually the new comers prefer to use PHP as server side scripting. The reason behind this is that there are hundreds of open source (GPL) PHP scripts that are able to fulfill the webmaster’s requirements. However PHP also has some limitations in features required by advanced websites same as in the case of MySQL, due to this limitation some professional web developers prefer to use ASP.NET or JSP. Some other developers still prefer to use Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP or PERL.

Email

Now the next very important aspect to be talked about is Email. At present no one can move further in this computer world with having his/her Email account. The one who is planning to do any kind of activity through computer such as to run a business or to provide any kind of service, then the first thing he/she need to do is to open an Email account. There are many hosting plans that include the feature of having some email accounts with customer’s domain. The availability of number and size of email accounts totally depends on the hosting plan one opted. Generally this feature is not included in free hosting. Small plans provide only about 10 accounts where as big plans do not have the limited number. Usually those email accounts are web based and accessible through POP3 clients as well.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

The other service is FTP. File Transfer Protocol is a usual way of transferring files across the Internet. Most of the webmasters used to upload and download their websites contents through FTP. The process of uploading or downloading is performed by using FTP client software. Webmasters require FTP username and password so as to access their web server. There are any hosts who use to provide more than one FTP account to their customers as per their requirement. Rather FTP is unspecified; it is not advisable as per the security reasons.

Control Panel

Control panel is the service available by many of the web hosting companies to their customers. It is a web based application that helps in managing websites. Some important functions performed by the control panel are that it used to manage email accounts, providing statistics, managing FTP accounts, managing domains and sub-domains and managing databases. The control panel application that is mostly used by the user is cPanel. There are many companies who use to develop their own control panel application.

Uptime

Now after having all the services, the thing of concern which remains is how the user keeps his/her website uptime most of the time. If anyone is having a website with excellent features but it remains down most of the time it will be of no use, as when ever the visitors visit his/her website and found it down then later on they will think twice before visiting it. In result he/she will suffer the loss of visitors. Uptime is very important feature of web hosts and that is usually measured in percentage. If a server remains down near about 30 minutes a day will have an uptime percentage of about 99.98%, which is acceptable for most small to medium business websites. If any of the business website is not having at least this percentage of uptime then that website is not suitable for a business website. Mission critical sites cannot tolerate frequent outages, thus they may use web monitoring services to notify web administrators immediately when an outage happens.

Price

Finally the factor left is price. In this option also there is a great variability found like for example customer is having option to choose between the prices ranging from 0 to $1000 per month. For most personal, small and medium websites the total amount of cost involved is just $15 per month. Thus its not at all advisable for business website owners to select very cheap plans let say less than $5 because this price can lead to huge cost indirectly afterwards.