Unlimited Web Hosting Accounts – Good or Bad?
Since about a year the web hosting companies around the globe have been entangled in a ‘never ending’ price war. Not unlike a Jihad nobody seems to be able to stop it.
Within a few month only web hosting accounts have gone from 600GB what already is much more than an average user will need in his entire lifetime, to 1’500GB and now are set to unlimited already. The same happened with the offer of web traffic or the so called bandwidth. Set to unlimited enables should enable every user to have his/her on MySpace or Facebook running. But does it really?
Unlimited Web Space and Unlimited Traffic vs. Server Uptime
I was wondering what the bigger webhosting companies would have to say about their uptime guarantees and promises after giving away unlimited web hosting accounts. I was up for a surprise when i learned that one of the biggest hosting companies had removed the uptime guarantee from the advertising and from their TOS. This seemed to be what i was looking for, so i went asking what’s up and why it has been removed. Whilst i never actually got an answer why the 99.9% clausal had been removed i was even more surprised to hear that the 99% guarantee only concerns NETWORK UPTIME and NOT SERVER UPTIME! Did you know the difference? Further i was told that users, hosting on shared servers, had to accept some downtime or buy a dedicated server!
So let’s get this one straight; 99% Network uptime means that their network is up and running 99% of the time in a 12 month period. NOT Your Website!
Only if the hosting companies guarantee you a 99.9% SERVER UPTIME your website(s) will be visible to the public for 99% of the time measured over a 12 month period.
Is that what All Web Hosting Companies do?
No, it’s not, at least not yet. I went on with my search for the truth about unlimited webspace. My next stop was www.ixwebhosting.com, a medium sized web hosting company that hosts about 350’000 domains at the moment.
IX also offers unlimited webspace and unlimited bandwidth plus a free domain for life.
First i looked at their TOS and look what i found:
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
IX Web Hosting guarantees that your website will be up and running at least 99.9% of the time during any 12-month period. This guarantee includes network uptime, server uptime, web server and service uptime.
Now that sounds different to me! The next stop was the live chat section. I always like to meet Level 1 support staff before i decide if a host is good for me or my customers. And i got my confirmation within minutes:
Sergey Bakhmach: Thank you for coming, my name is Sergey. How may I help you?
McHow2: Hi, i wonder how much server uptime (in %)you can guarantee your customers. I need my sites to be available 24/7 7 days a week
Sergey Bakhmach: we guaranty 99.9% uptime
McHow2: network uptime or server uptime, that seems to be a difference
Sergey Bakhmach: it is your servers uptime
Sergey Bakhmach: and we recently changed our server location and we now have stable network with new channnels we provide 99.9% server uptime
Size Does Matter
So why can a huge web hosting company only guarantee 99% Network uptime while a medium company can guarantee you 99% server uptime? My guess for now it’s the size that matters here. As larger a hosting company gets as more problems come up. Slow support response if at all and slow server response. CPU overload errors and MySql slow queries come up on daily bases. I will keep on investigating the matter and let you know here what i found.
I have to say though that even if you host your website or blog on a big company’s server you might not experience any problems at all. That widely depends on WHO ELSE is on the same (shared) server and on how many sites you are hosting on one account.
Important Things To Keep in Mind when you select your Web Hosting Companies
- Keep in mind that if you host all your many web sites on one server, if one goes down – they all go down, and your complete web presence disappears at once for several hours. that can be very costly.
- If you run Google AdSense campaigns on your sites, your sites are better up and running at all times. Not only do you loose clicks but the Cost per Click (CPC) will also slowly decrease.
- When selling your own or Affiliate products on your site or blog you are likely to loose business while your web presence is not available to your potential customers.
- And Finally , if you pay for your clicks, if you run Google AdWords campaigns for example, you don’t want to pay for clicks that end on a 404 or a 500 page. That’s a total waste of money.
Just a little update on the IX web hosting package:
After another life chat support session, I found out that IX also hosts foreign domain names such as .nl .de .gr and so on. The second thing i forgot to mention in my article was the variety of auto script installers found on their Control Panel. Even though it’s not CPanel, it’s quite comfty to use. You’ll find anything from WordPress to Joomla and even quite some fancy scripts i have never heard of, but they look interesting…
At the moment I’m in the middle of a research of the importance (or unimportance) to host a European domain in the country of origin, like .de in Germany, or if it doesn’t matter to host it on US soil. I’ll let you know the outcome in my next article. If the outcome is negative towards home country hosting; why would anyone want to host on a German server? The packages offered in Germany are outdated to say the least. But more of this is to come soon. If you want to be notified, sign up to the RSS news feed of my blog. You’ll only get a mail when i publish a new article. No spam no advertising mails.
Cheers
McHow2
Every persons those who are becoming an owner of a website has to know about the things that have been discussed or given over here. The things which are used by the hosting companies to market their business. Things would be more useful to get awareness to select the hosting company.