New report reveals shocking, never-before-told, insights into web
hosting providers dirty little secret that they don’t want you to find out
about…
“How long is it before your website
becomes a victim of your hosting provider going under due to their bad management
practices, where the provider thinks it simply
can’t happen to them …”
The big question is…
How can you be 100% certain
this won’t happen to YOU?
Take a few minutes… read this controversial report and
find out the raw truths about the web hosting industry that no-one
talks about – and why you need to know about it right now.
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From The Desk Of Aaron Dwyer |
Wednesday 10:23 a.m. 14th Dec 05
Re: It’s time to set the record straight
Those who know me, know that I am a “call it as I see it” type of
guy.
It’s not my intention to slam or offend anyone in particular here. But, I know that some of
you will get hot under the collar after reading this report.
If you have been around the internet for a while, or been through
a couple or a few web hosting providers, you’re probably starting to believe
that all hosting companies are the agents of evil. Have faith my friends, because
they are not all bad.
I’ve been sitting here on the sidelines watching... trying to be polite
and bite my
tongue... But, I just can’t do it anymore!!!
A VERY dangerous pattern has been emerging lately.
SO “dangerous” that I need to speak up and set the record straight
on a few things -- to
put the raw, unsalted, facts into your hands -- right here, right now.
Let’s face it, web hosting is a large industry, and as in all
industries there are those that choose to get ahead in the short term by
deceit.
The whole idea behind paying for professional web hosting is to
provide as near to 100% uptime for your website. If you wanted a site that was
down more than it was up you would host it on your own computer and that would
be the end of it.
Before I get into it, let me ask you one simple question:
Would You Knowingly Build Your House
On a Bed Of Quicksand?
I know, it might seem like a stupid question.
But, if you would never jeopardize the safety of your family by knowingly building your
house on a bed of quicksand, then why are you willing to
jeopardize your financial
security by building your entire online business on a bed of
quicksand?
Let me explain...
There are several types of web hosting that you can get your hands
on these days.
Shared hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private server [VPS]
(semi dedicated), co-location and dedicated. If that all sounds like a foreign
language to you, you will understand this…
Guess what - they are all susceptible to the one little secret
that no one wants you to know.
It’s called OVERSELLING
“What the heck is overselling?”, I hear you ask. Overselling
basically means to sell beyond the means of delivery. However, that's a little
bit oversimplified. From a web hosting providers’ perspective, overselling
relates to selling more drive SPACE and BANDWIDTH than
they are physically permitted. An example will help to paint a clearer picture…
Let’s take Shared Hosting as an example, since that is the hosting
category that most of you reading this document will fall into. If your hosting
provider had a 100GB per month limit on their bandwidth from their provider and
the package they offered to their customers had 10GB limit, and they had 30
clients on that package, in total your provider has oversold on their bandwidth
by 200GB.
Now what happens if all of
those 30 clients ended up using their 10GB of allowable space??
Good question. Usually the hosting company has to pay a premium
for the bandwidth used over their initial quota of 100GB. For some smaller
hosting providers this can and does break them. Leaving your site dead in the
water from a server that’s been “switched off” and leaving you out of pocket
with your hosting fees and worse, think of the lost money due to downtime.
So you can see that when overselling backfires it can be a hosting
providers’ worst nightmare, and you never really know who is doing it or how
much they are doing it. Sounds bad doesn’t it.
Oh but it doesn’t end
there. Not by a long shot.
Unethical hosting providers (and they are out there by the truck
load) will oversell their services outrageously in order to make more profit, and
apart from opening themselves up to crippling bandwidth bills for excess
bandwidth usage, this puts a strain on their servers CPU(s) and RAM which in
a shared environment has a direct impact on your own website. Have you ever noticed your site
is regularly extremely slow and not able to respond. WARNING BELLS should be going off.
With the server jamb packed full of hundreds of customers websites,
it’s the server resources that take a hammering and every customer on that
server suffers. In fact, this may happen even if the company was not
overselling bandwidth. Something to be aware of.
In the past most hosts have put limits on the amount of domains
that you could host on each account. Most times just 1, but some offered more
as teasers. As more and more hosts, especially the smaller ones, are realising
that to win your business they need to offer the customers more, unlimited
domains start to become to the norm.
This means that a customer who was in the past only using a small
percentage of their account, now has the ability to fill up their account with
their rightfully paid up drive space and bandwidth. More and more websites
these days are taking on forums, and blogs, and running scripts and databases
which place the server resources at a premium.
Hosting providers overselling is getting more and more dangerous.
But the real kicker is that
even if your hosting provider doesn’t oversell, there is a very good chance
that they are indirectly overselling. Their upstream (the bandwidth provider) probably oversells to them.
AAGGHHH. Where does it end. It doesn’t, but the customer has a
right to make an informed decision about their hosting instead of being kept in
the dark.
You might think this overselling is unfair, but this doesn’t just
happen in web hosting either.
Telecommunications providers exist by overselling. They bank on
only a set percent of their customers picking up the phone and using it at the
same time. What happens when more than the allotted percent of customers use
the phone. No more dial tones for anyone else. You’re basically cut-off.
Tough regulations govern some of the industries where overselling is the de facto rule, but that's NOT the case with hosts. Some think this is a good thing, some do not.
Overselling
however, keeps prices at low rates. If there would be no overselling, few of us
would have phones and those who would have, would pay some hefty fees to use
them. The same applies to hosting.
I’m not saying that overselling is entirely bad, however it is must
be done with careful planning and only when it’s possible. It is far too readily abused by
hosts that don’t know what they are doing simply to increase their profit
margins at the expense of their service level to their customers.
For
now though, let's deal with the facts. One of them is that you'll rarely see
web hosting companies willingly admitting on their website that they oversell.
The reason is that overselling in the web hosting business has been abused in
the past and caused many hosts and their customers considerable pain. It is still
being abused by many companies from the top of the hosting food chain (the
bandwidth providers) down to the bottom (resellers and shared hosting). Check
out my hosting food chain diagram later in the report where I talk about
resellers.
I see overselling as an even worse problem than “Unlimited
Bandwidth”. Another topic that makes my blood boil. In the end someone must pay
for bandwidth, it’s not unlimited. Perhaps that’s a topic for another report.
Right. So what the heck do you as a hosting customer do about all
this overselling.??
If the vast majority of web
hosts won’t tell you that they oversell their services then how do you know if
they are, and if so, by how much?
Sorry to tell you this, but you’re going to have to figure that
out on your own based on each hosts information they display on their website.
I’m going to give you some methods of how to work it out.
Firstly, the hosts that even mention the word overselling are most
likely the ones that don’t oversell. They are very proud on their stance on
overselling and they’ve realised that they can use it as a marketing advantage.
That will change of course once web hosts realise that they will need to
mention it, otherwise they will lose reputation.
But let’s not forget that they are actually still selling
resources that are already oversold by their upstream (which is not their
fault) and overselling resources like CPU and RAM is not an exact science in
the shared hosting environment. So it could be argued that all hosts oversell
resources to a certain degree.
This means, I wouldn’t rule out hosting companies that consciously oversell
as long as it’s done carefully and based on experience, using real, meaningful
statistical data to support it. Watch out for hosts that aggressively oversell.
Also if you wanted to search for a hosting company that that did not oversell,
you would find them so few and far between that you may never strike one.
What
to look for that may indicate over-overselling of resources.
1) Luckily for you, bandwidth can never be free, and so has a minimum
price. From my reading and since I’m in the game, outrageous overselling starts
in the band of $0.33 and $0.50 per GB of data transfer. Anything less than that
and you could be in for future
trouble with your web host.
For example if your hosting provider is offering
a package with 100GB of bandwidth for $10/month, (10 divided by 100) that
equates to 10cents per GB of bandwidth. I don’t know of many (if any) bandwidth
providers that offer their precious bandwidth for that sort of money. There are
no set rules to this people, but WARNING
BELLS.
2) The bandwidth / space ratio. Hard-drive space just should not be
oversold. This is widely understood in the industry. But some hosts still do
it. Customers have a tendency to actually use their allocated space.
Overselling on drive space can be a real server killer. It is much riskier to
do so, which keeps the incidents of it low. This allows for us to gauge a
bandwidth / space ratio. When you seriously
oversell on the bandwidth but don’t do so with the drive space, the bandwidth /
space ratio grows.
I’ve seen ratios as high as 60/1 which means
60GB bandwidth with 1GB space offered. Of course there are probably worse out
there. My take on it, is that serious overselling is most likely in the range
of 20/1 to 30/1. Once again that is my view, but WARNING BELLS.
Those two are the main indicators, check out a few hosts and
compare your findings and you will be surprised, very surprised, by what
results you come up with.
Knowledge is power my friends, and always compare a couple of
hosts before you sign up with them. There is nothing more I can or will ask of
you than to be an informed customer… your website depends on it.
But let’s not forget that a hosting company is comprised
of more than just offering some hard drive space and bandwidth.
I have found after being on both sides of the fence, firstly as
hosting user and now as a hosting provider, that the overall reputation of a
web host provider goes a long way to making your decision to go with them
relatively easy.
So how do you gauge the reputation of a web hosting provider (who
you don’t know from Adam) when all they have is a website for you to look at?
I’ve compiled a bit of a list of what I think is important to
gauge your web hosts reputation. Full disclosure of all aspects of a web host
should be a requirement and I would accept nothing less from my provider.
These are the points that I personally look for in host and you
should too. If the host you
are checking out doesn’t display these points that I’ve outlined, I would say
that they don’t do it, because if they did they would be proud to show off the
fact that they are indeed a reputable and stable hosting provider. A lot
of these points take considerable effort and a financial commitment to achieve
and those that do it will advertise it.
If a web host doesn’t have one or two of the not so critical
criteria I outline here, that doesn’t mean they are any less reputable than the
ones that do, but on the whole, every host should have every point on this list
covered to some degree.
·
Bandwidth
Quality and quantity – what types of telecommunication
feeds does the datacenter have? and are there more than one? for redundancy
should one be unavailable.
There is a bit of technical knowledge required
here to really know what’s going on, which I won’t go into in this report, but
at the minimum you can compare hosting providers and look at what they offer.
·
Server Resources
RAM, HDD, CPU – the bigger the better. 2 CPUs
are better than 1, etc. Enough said.
·
Server Overloaded?
Ask the host how many customers are on the
server they want to put you on? They should be able to answer you truthfully without
hesitation, and also have an idea how many customers will fit or how many
customers they are prepared to have on the one server.
·
Staff Numbers
Staff members of at least more than 1. If it’s a
one person operation, what happens if that person disappears, or gets sick or injured?
At least 2 people need to know how to run the operation. It’s all about
redundancy.
·
Datacenter / Network and Location [IMPORTANT]
Where is the datacenter (where the server is
physically located in the world), and what is the network setup (how big is
their internet connection) they provide. Do they have redundant power, water,
internet feeds, etc and are
they secure and on call 24/7?
There are some real dodgy datacenters out there,
and they truly are business destroyers. They don’t just destroy the hosting
provider that use them, but in turn you the customer!
Compare the datacenter / network locations of
the hosts you are checking out and see their differences or if they in fact use
the same datacenter. They should be very proud and confident in the datacenter
they have chosen as the solid base from which to build their business and in
turn your business on.
·
Backups [IMPORTANT]
Are you really covered.? I know some hosts that
don’t even know how to spell backup, let alone offer any. I have even hosted
with them, and know the pain of loss when they make a mistake and lose your
data, only to turn around and say “tough, you should have taken your own
backups!”, even though the loss was there fault. CRAZY!!! But it happens.
Does the host backup at all?, if so how? and
more importantly how often.? Can you ask to get your back data should you make
a mistake, or is it just for their use.?
Do they offer RAID? (extra hard disks in the
server which automatically take over if one goes down to reduce downtime)
Do they have off server and off site backups? No
good your backup data sitting on the same machine or in the same building. What
if nature decides that building doesn’t deserve to be there any more. Recent
hurricanes in the
So when a hard drive fails what happens then?
How long before you site comes back online? A reputable host will have action
plans outlined for this circumstance and be only to happy to tell you if you
ask.
·
Uptime [ULTRA IMPORTANT]
Now this one is very important. Does you host
show you their uptime statistics? and is it controlled or verified by a 3rd
party? A web host should be proud of their uptime, and want to show it off. If
not, then ask them to see some statistics of their last few months to gauge for
yourself. You deserve to know this information. And they should be able to give
it to you. If not I wonder what there excuse is.? Crappy uptime no doubt.
The marketers dream of 100% uptime is just not a
reality over a long term view. Servers do need software upgrades occasionally
to remain secure and current, and let’s face it, life is never that simple.
Issues happen, but it’s what we do when they happen that makes the difference.
If you have a proactive web host then uptime
will be high and stay high, it probably won’t be 100% all of the time, but it should
be over 99.5%. Anything less than that on a regular basis and I would be
looking for another host, because that 0.5% of downtime each month equals
around 3.6 hours where you site is not accessible. No website, no visitors, no
sales, no emails, dead as a dodo. Could your business operate like that? No
way.
A 99.9% uptime guarantee actually means that
your site could be down for up to 7.5 hours for that month. Which offers the
host more than enough time to do a server upgrade, or deal with a minor hardware
fault on the server or in the datacenter.
Also
watch out for uptime guarantee exceptions, most of them are the biggest load of
garbage this side of a refuse tip. From your point of view,
your site is either down or up. I don’t care whose fault it was, the hosting
provider or their upstream network company, or the datacenter.
If your site is down then it’s costing you
money. That is the industry that web hosting providers are in and they should
deal with it.
On top of that, uptime guarantees backed by some
tiny little credit like 1 hour for each hour of downtime. Come on. Get real. Hosting
providers should put their money where their mouth is, and give their customers
something back of substance as an uptime guarantee, and put it out there in
plain site for you to see without needing to dig through the fine print to find
it. With saying that if you are subjected to excessive downtime regularly, you just
can’t compensate for that and you are short changing people if you try.
·
Proximity to your Customers
/ Visitors
Where is the target audience for your website?
Chose a server that is in the same country as your target audience, as load
times of your website will display best for them.
·
Guarantees
Now this is important, you want to make sure
that you can trial the hosting provider without fear of losing your money.
Every host should have at least 30 days no questions asked money back guarantee
or a no pressure to buy trial period. Expect more from your guarantees.
·
Time in Business
How long has the hosting provider been in
business.? I know that everyone has to start somewhere, however if you have a
business that relies on your website heavily, I would be looking to a company
that isn’t entirely green. You don’t want to end up with a fly-by-nighter that
will take your money and do a runner when they realise that web hosting is a
lot harder than what they first thought.
·
Resellers
The hosting industry over the last few years has
surged ahead due to enhancements in server control panel software. This
software allows a web hosting provider to offer accounts that a user can use to
be a small web host of their own.
Once again it is not always apparent whether a
web host is a reseller or not. But you as a customer have a right to know what
you are paying for and you should ask if you are not sure. There is nothing wrong with
using a reseller but be aware they are another link in the chain.
Usually if there is a support issue that they
can’t handle, you raise it with them and then they raise it with their hosting
provider, who then may have to raise it with the datacenter, etc. They don’t
have complete control over the server, and are limited in their abilities to
remedy problems.
Here is a diagram of the web hosting food chain.
Remember, it’s good to know where you stand in the scheme of web hosting.
Of course Shared users are not always 6 deep in
the chain but they can be which is the purpose of the diagram.
·
Registered Business or
Company
You would be surprised to learn just how simple
it is to come up with a template website and get a reseller account and call
yourself a web host provider without registering as a business or company. It
is one of the reasons why the industry has become tainted with these smaller
cowboy operators that fly in and out taking peoples’ money when they get sick
of the business.
If the hosting provider has taken the time and
money to register as a business, or the next level of obtaining a legal
operating company, you can give it a big tick towards being a reputable
provider. They will be proud to show this information off to you.
If someone does think they can simply become a
web hosting provider and bashes together a site on a reseller account, they are
sorely mistaken. It takes a great deal of hard work and effort to run any business
well, a web hosting company is no exception. You can go through this list and
you will find that you can pick the cowboys from a mile away. You will be
amazed.
·
Support [ULTRA IMPORTANT]
What are the listed support contact times? Is it
24/7 or something close to it.?
Do they advertise their support contact time,
business hours? How rapid is the response and more importantly how helpful.
I always suggest that you send your
potential host a support email to see how long it takes them to respond and the
quality of the response.
Do they use a support ticketing system to
catalogue and store your support issues in a database that are communicated
through email? This way tickets are not lost or forgotten, and multiple staff
members can answer support issues with everyone being on the same page. Once
again this software usually costs money and goes a long way to enhancing a web
hosts reputation.
Is their
support system on the same server as their customers? I’ve seen it so many times where the customers’ server goes down
(for whatever reason) and you can’t access the support system or even get
emails to the provider because it’s on the same server. It’s when things go
wrong that you need support even more, so this to me, is a massive problem. If it’s not made apparent to you, then I strongly
recommend you ask them about it.
Another important ingredient of a good host, is
their commitment to proactive support. This means they don’t just wait for a
support ticket to come in before talking with the user. A lot of times if the
host notices something is amiss with the users account even if it was not the
providers fault, they could talk with you before it becomes a problem. I know
of very few hosts that act
proactively with their customers, because it takes a commitment and a great
deal of effort to forge relationships with their customers.
Most hosting providers don’t find value in this,
but in reality without satisfied customers they don’t have a long lasting
business.
Does the provider offer self help guides to
assist in getting your account up to speed or sorted out in case of problems?
Tutorials are available for every control panel and most other aspects of web
hosting. If your host doesn’t provide them to you then they are being cheap and
not looking out for your best interests.
What about a support knowledgebase or frequently
asked questions (FAQ) list? These usually can answer your questions without
needing to contact their support department. A feature such as this will save
you time, give you an easier, less complicated experience, and provides an
insight into how committed they are to helping you.
·
Communication
So once you become a customer of a hosting
provider, how often do they communicate with you? How do they go about doing it?
By email mailing list, or forum, or blog. Under what circumstances do they
communicate with you? Are they reactive or proactive?
You must receive something, because web hosting
isn’t a set it and forget it gig, an open line of communication goes a long way
to keeping you happy. I’ve been a user with web hosts that would ignore you at
all costs, yet still demand and take your money each and every month.
Ridiculous behaviour that was swiftly not tolerated by taking my business
elsewhere.
Too often web hosts think that because of the
impersonal nature of the internet that they are immune to talking with their
customers. What a pile of rubbish!! You are the whole reason they are in
business and keeping you at an arms-length is not the answer, nor is it
acceptable.
As in most aspects of life, in web
hosting it’s all about you, the people that host on the providers servers,
there is nothing else.
·
Terms of service,
Acceptable Use Policy, Privacy
Every hosting company should have a Terms of
Service (ToS) or Acceptable Use Policy (AuP) or Privacy Statement. These are
important because they explain your web hosts stance on various aspects of
online existence. For example, do they allow adult content or other high
bandwidth online operations? Having these high bandwidth accounts mixed in
normal business accounts is bad news. Without a ToS or AuP you have no idea
where you stand.
I strongly urge you to read these because here
is where the web host can get you with the fine print. The brief and attractive
write-up of the hosting plan tells you nothing. This is where the real story
is. A thorough ToS or AuP not only covers the web host but helps you as well.
Just make sure you are happy with what they ask of you and where you stand
before you signup with them.
·
Testimonials
As simple as it sounds I still see hosting
providers that don’t offer testimonials. How can you know if the host is
reputable if you don’t know that existing customers are happy customers. Truly
amazing. Why don’t they offer testimonials? They don’t have any. If they did
they would be proud to show them off.
·
Billing System
Your hosting provider should provide a billing
system whereby you can log into it and see where you are at with your payments,
and past bills. This software is not that expensive and shows a commitment to
their operations if they use systems to streamline and automate their business.
·
Payment options
What sort of payment options do they accept? Not
everyone accepts all payment types. Be aware that to pay by anything other than
credit card is against the norm in web hosting.
However that being said, I’ve always believed
that money is money and you should offer your customers all methods of making
payment. For example cheque, direct debit, paypal, credit card, etc. As a
customer you should be aware that different methods of payment take longer than
others to take effect so if you plan on paying by anything other than credit
card, expect delays until your money clears.
·
Scripts
There are several options for hosting providers
to offer you the choice of auto installer software to install various scripts
that make your web hosting really come alive. This of course costs the host
money to provide this service, but you should always choose a host that has
these scripts available to you as one day you may just need them. Having them
automatically installed for you at the click of a mouse button, really cuts
hours off the setup time.
·
Cost
Don’t be fooled by cost. I really hate to say
it, because you can get some good things for free, but you do actually get what you pay for with web
hosting. If your host is charging you next to nothing, I guarantee that
something has been sacrificed in the above list to deliver that to you. You
would hope that it’s not backups or support or uptime, but I bet it’s one of the
big ones.
Having said that, on the other end of the
spectrum (which really gets me going), is paying too much for hosting. This is rife through
the internet, since hosts have gone unchecked for far too long, charging
massive prices for no more service (in some cases less service). It’s
absolutely outrageous!! Do your research people.
·
Contactable
So many times I see web hosts that don’t list an
address, location or phone numbers. I mean this is the biggest crock in the
game. What are they afraid of? That you are going to hunt them down with a
baseball bat (or worse) after they shaft you. Of course that must be it. J
You have a right to know where they operate from
and that you can call them on the phone and actually talk one on one with
someone from the operation.
Offering anything less is shady business and I
make it a habit of not doing business with anyone online that doesn’t offer me
an address and phone number. I usually call them on the number, just to make
sure they are actually who they say they are.
·
Addon Domains – Parked
Domains
Why have I listed this? As a consumer you should
be aware of the possibilities of your web hosting selection. If you spend money
on web hosting for a package that is bigger than you need, and let’s face it
most hosting companies advertise outrageously large plans with massive available
drive space and bandwidth to suck you in, but then only offer you 1 or a few
domains (if you’re lucky) with which to use all that resource up with.
What a
scam. Bottom line is you paid for a set amount of
space and bandwidth and you are entitled to use all of it. Usually you can’t do
this with just one website (unless it’s a big one) so offering multiple domains
allows you to get the most out of your account.
·
Management Tools / Control
Panel
Boy have I seen some crap control panels or even
none at all with some web hosts. This is completely unacceptable. You pay good
money for hosting and you need to be able to maintain your website(s) easily.
cPanel, Plesk, Helm are quality control panels, there are others as well.
These control panels cost money but they are
worth their weight in gold. The user can manage their own affairs (add / remove
email accounts, do backups, check out your web logs, etc) and need not bother
the host for the day-to-day management of their site(s).
See over on the next page where I have put together a simplified
check list to use during your research of a prospective host.
Reputable Hosting Provider
Check list
|
Bandwidth Server Resources Server Overloaded? Staff Numbers Datacenter / Network and Location Backups Proximity to your Customers / Visitors Guarantee Uptime Time in Business Resellers Registered Business or Company |
Support Communication Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy Testimonials Billing System Payment Options Scripts Cost Contactable Addon / Parked domains Management Tools / Control Panel |
I’m proud to be involved in the web hosting industry and I know
others that join me in being proud of what they do in this industry. I applaud
them.
I hope that this report has made you think about your web hosting
and has armoured you with enough information to go out and get yourself a good
web hosting provider. They are out there, people, you just need to sift out the
bad seeds first.
Feel free to share this report with your friends and colleagues.
To your online success,
Aaron Dwyer
Web Smart Central Pty Ltd
Web Smart Central is an Australian company that specialises in
providing Australian’s an affordable alternative for Web Hosting. Check out our
overselling guarantee.
Send your questions or comments to: aarond@websmartcentral.com
P.S. – In case you briefly
skimmed this report and decided to head straight to the end to
find the “good stuff”, the main point that I wanted you to get out
of this report is to be aware of if your hosting provider is actively overselling
and what damage it can do to your online business when they abuse it and the
server resources dwindle, and how do you deal with it. I also outlined some key
factors in determining the reputation of a web hosting provider.