Reading Between the Lines When Selecting Website Hosting

For most first-time site owners, and even many long-time site owners, selecting a hosting company simply consists of checking around for the biggest promises combined with the lowest prices.  That seems reasonable.  That is what, after all, value is: the most for the least.  The problem is that most shared hosting companies are now promising the same things, but not providing the same services.  How is this possible?  The answer comes in how each company defines its terms, particularly as it relates to “unlimited” anything.  For the nitty-gritty of what each hosting company is really offering, you have to venture away from the marketing pages and into the shadowy world of the “Terms of Service” (TOS).

Only by reading the TOS will you discover, for instance, that many shared hosts have policies against installing things like chat software, or that some companies won’t allow you to offer downloads for your readers (although there are ways around each of these problems as we’ll see in later posts).  But what is really important to learn is the factual information about the server resources you will be allowed to use.  Remember that on shared hosting, your site will share a server with many other sites.  So your site will be expected to behave in a certain way in order not to bog down all the other sites.  For instance, having “unlimited bandwidth” doesn’t mean anything at all if you are on a server with 200 other sites and will be shut down if you use more than 5% of the processing power.

Many times, however, even the Terms of Service are written in vague terms, as the hosting company doesn’t want to be pinned down.  For the most part, when all you find in the TOS are more vague promises, then it is time to move on to another company.

Let’s look at a real world example, though with the names of the companies removed and the legalize has been paraphrased.  Which hosting provider would you choose?

Company A:  We place no limit on the bandwidth which may be transferred from an account each month, but we do have to protect all customers who share a server.  We sometimes work with customers who have special needs to place them on larger boxes or boxes with fewer sites.

Company B:  No hosting account may use more than 25% of server processing resources for longer than 15 seconds at a time.  Customers who consistently use more than their allotted resources will be contacted to upgrade their account.

As I said, the above excerpts of were paraphrased from actual companies, two of the largest hosting companies in the world.  Which would you choose?  You have to pick Company B.

While Company A is well-known and seems to be going the extra mile by saying that they sometimes work with heavy-use sites, the reality is that this is a far cry from a real, in-writing solution.  You are not given any information at all about their criteria for excessive use.  In a real-world test of Company A, I discovered that a dynamic site that uses the database frequently started to fall apart after only about 100 hits in an hour.  When this sort of use became consistent, an by then the site was terribly slow, it was simply taken down by the hosting company with no offers to move the site to a “larger box.”

Meanwhile, Company B almost seems harsh in their TOS compared with Company A, but here you have, in writing, precisely what you can and cannot do.  You can even track how you are doing within your control panel.  So when that day comes, if it comes, when you begin to hit the traffic jackpot, you’ll be able to see that you are getting close to maxing out your welcome on the current plan, and you’ll know what is coming next;  you’ll be asked to upgrade your account.

So when checking around for a hosting company, take a side trip away from their marketing material and visit the TOS.  If it is just as vague as the marketing materials, take your business elsewhere.