A business’ survival in today’s connected world is highly dependent on its ability to access global markets and far flung clients. Although some specialized service providers can still survive without tapping into the vast online commerce potentials, it isn’t true for the vast majority of businesses.
Globalization, and especially the ever-increasing number of people going online, makes it integral for any business to make sure it has a strong online presence.
But then, although the business may do all it can to build a website that represents it ideally, it will all be for naught if the hosting environment it resides on is a deceptive one.
Yes, most of the hosting providers out there are good-to-excellent service providers – otherwise they wouldn’t survive the onslaught of bad reviews from unsatisfied customers who would make sure everyone knew about their failure to provide the services they had promised them. And then again, there are ways other providers (call them “the bad apples”) could be lying to their clients, or at the very least bending the truth a little bit.
No? Ok; then let’s see 5 ways web hosting providers could be lying to you:
- The “Unlimited Everything” Offer: this is probably the most common lie out there. In a typical scenario, a business will buy or sign up for a hosting plan that meets its present and near-future requirements. For the vast majority of such businesses it simply means a website with a handful pages. Those at the higher end of the business industry usually include ecommerce sites that handle online sales for thousands of customers per month.
This normally means the bandwidth and disk space usage can be pre-determined and hence a suitable hosting plan can be found for the site. A business will look for one that meets its requirements and sign up for it. And that is what the hosting domain administrators are hoping for: that the client will have already considered the limits of the resources they will utilize, because they do have a limit on the resources they allocate for each plan – they’re just not telling clients about them.
Come the day when the site needs CPU and RAM processing power due to a sudden rise in traffic or the installation of a resource-intensive application, and website owners will receive a limitations warning notice from the administrators asking them to either delete files, kill the apps or move to a bigger plan.
- The “We are Cheap” Declaration: whenever a business or client sees the word “cheap” on a hosting provider’s page, they should immediately ask, “Yes, but at what cost?” Hosting providers, like any other business, need to make a profit. If they are offering services on the cheap, you can rest assured that there are some serious cost-cutting measures being taken in the background – and it’s usually at the users’ expense.
- The “99.99% Uptime” Guarantee: anyone that has owned a computer knows that they will eventually have to be “switched off and then on” again, as the most common remedy goes. The hosting providers’ servers are also computers – they’re just bigger. The 99.99% uptime means that the downtime is about 3 hours per year and considering that time one can see how quickly that time can pass.
The providers get away with it because, first, most clients don’t even realize their sites are down and by the time they do, the sites are back up and running. Second, the providers will send out emails to their clients informing them that “a routine scheduled maintenance of one sort or the other needs to take place and you have no other choice but to accept it for as long as we deem it necessary.” Again, customers don’t usually complain. After all, it is for our own good, isn’t it?
- The “Free Domain Name” Swindle: many hosting providers will offer their clients a free domain name when they sign up with them. Most clients will be happy by what looks like a free gift but which really isn’t because the devil lies in the details.
Hosting providers usually register the domain names under their own name. That is fine until the time comes to renew the subscription, in which case the client will be asked to pay the normal, or even inflated, price if they want to continue to use the domain name. In case the client wants to move on to another hosting provider they could literally be held hostage by the provider’s unwillingness to relinquish the name.
- The “Anytime Full Refund” Gimmick: good, honest hosting providers might actually give back 100% of the money a client paid in case they no longer want to continue with the service – but they are far and few.
There are usually accounting or marketing tricks that allows for them to cut prorated services (especially once the token 30 or 60 days have passed), fees for services provided – and that could even including the processing fees for refunding the money itself – and a number of other charges that quickly add up to a sum that is very much less than the expected “full refund.”
The best way to avoid these little fibs is to make sure businesses read, re-read and understand the contract they are signing. If they can’t understand it, they should find someone who can.
