The web hosting industry is a respected business that includes some of the best technology companies that continue to provide excellent service to their clients. iPage, GoDaddy and HostGator are three companies that constantly top “best web hosting provider” lists and have an abundance of happy and grateful clients to boast about.

But just like in every industry today, the hosting business has seen a rapid climb in the number of scams and downright thievery being perpetrated by less respected companies. Many clients who thought they were investing in a sound hosting deal have found themselves in the middle of an online nightmare. Some are simply swindled out of their cash and given nothing in return while others are simply locked out of their accounts for trivial offences that they may or may not have been warned about in a shady “terms and conditions” contract. Worse, some users have had data stolen, which many times is irreversible or requires tons of resources to correct.

The list of scams goes on. Let us take a look at a few and see what you can do to avoid them:

The False Pointers

Most hosting scams are based on false marketing campaigns. These might include bogus reviews aimed at promoting their services as being the best in the business. Over time, this helps with conning people into becoming clients. Once the scammers have gotten their unsuspecting customers on board, it is time to put the second phase in motion. One recent scam involved a web host company with a server it used to divert all its clients’ page-requests to point towards their own pages. When individuals directly requested the pages (by typing in the URL, for example) the clients’ normal, original pages are displayed. But if the traffic were from search engine result,s the modified pages with the providers’ embedded links were served. This way, clients, for the most part, couldn’t catch the host’s scheme as they couldn’t see the modifications.

Advice: Always make sure you perform thorough research before settling on a hosting provider. Seek information from established and reputed reviewers. Also, selecting a hosting provider with big name companies as clients could help you rest assured it’s a viable hosting option.

The “Free Domain Name” Offer

One popular crowd-drawer involves hosting providers that offer free domain names to their clients. Everyone knows that with time a domain name’s value increases. This is especially true if the site gains popularity. Search engines rank sites with SEO-friendly domain names more favorably; this further increases its value.

Some hosts make this offer and include a condition that it is only valid for the first year. Once that year passes, clients are asked to pay if they want to continue using it. And even then, the ownership is still retained by the hosting company. In other words, the clients are held hostage by the company. If the client should choose to discontinue the contract, they will have to walk away without their domain names, resulting in a huge blow to their rankings.

Advice: Whenever possible, buy your own domain name. Prices are extremely competitive and shelling out tens of dollars for years of usage is always worth it.

The “Free Template” Offer

Here too, some hosting providers will advertise that they have hundreds of templates that their clients can choose from. These untrustworthy web hosts will even allow their clients to modify them to meet their unique needs. What most of these companies don’t tell their clients is that they can only use the templates while they are still clients. Those that choose to move to another provider must often redesign their sites from scratch.This means, all the time and energy spent on tweaking and customizing the template was for nothing. Any recognizable brand that was created and associated with the clients’ services or products is killed-off.

Advice: If you can, always use your own templates. Otherwise, carefully pore over the fine print and select the hosting provider that guarantees full ownership of all templates and graphics etc. There are tons of web hosts that offer clear information when it comes to free and easy to use templates.

The “SEO” Scam

A website’s popularity is based on its search engine ranking. Most website owners spend mini-fortunes promoting their sites. Some web hosting providers, taking note of this need, propose to promote their clients’ sites with offers like “search engine submission”, “link building” or “link exchange” – all for a price, of course.

The scam is that submitting a site to search engines is free. So, clients will basically be paying for something that is already free. Link building is a task that must be handled with care. Search engines (Google, in particular) know which links are genuine and which ones are not – like those pointing to the hosts’ own sites. A site can get penalized for including links that aren’t organic. Link exchanges too can result in negative ranking if search engines deem a site to simply be a “link farm” – one that simply has links for the sake of having them.

Advice: Stay away from free SEO schemes. SEO needs a lot of work and can never be achieved by cutting corners, let alone for free. If you want to promote your site, it will cost you and will be worth every cent.