I created this site for two reasons, to give honest help to people who are making the decision to run their own website, and, also, to make a little money. So then the question becomes, if I am trying to make money on this site by referring you to hosting companies (and, by the way, you can’t get a better deal by going directly to the host–sometimes it is even worse), can I give honest reviews? The answer is yes, and if you’ve read several of the reviews here, you likely know I can be brutal. The reason I am able to do this, besides just a natural tendency toward honesty, goes back to why I decided I wanted to help people at all. In fact, I decided I was going to do this site before I realized I could become an affiliate for the hosting companies.
What Happened to Me: When I first decided I wanted to try my hand at running websites, I was completely unprepared for the task. My first thought was that I wanted free hosting. I piddled around with that for about a month before realizing that it was not a good solution for anything. Free hosting doesn’t just cost nothing; it’s worth nothing, too. So the next thing I did was to do a Google search looking for website hosting reviews. I found a site, unfortunately. The site I found was useless. It had a “Top Ten Hosts” page and ranked the providers from 1 to ten and gave a little marketing info from each hosting company and the price. I picked the top rated host, paying that site owner in the process, and went off feeling confident and wise. I had done research and picked the best host. I had things like “unlimited bandwidth” and all sorts of great add-ons. Life was good.
Things started off pretty well. I was pleased for about a month. Then strange things started happening. The site would freeze or slow down terribly. By month four, my traffic was getting even higher (who doesn’t want more traffic), and the site was going down altogether. Then my site started being manually taken down by the host, which would put a message for all my readers to see, that the site owner needed to call customer service. When I did, they told me I needed to optimize and repair my databases, which I did, and they put me back online. The next time they did this, I was on vacation and the site remained down for most of a week.
By month seven, the traffic had skyrocketed. The site was unbearably slow, but the visitors were putting up with it. I was working with the database. I was removing images and processes. I was using caching. I was doing everything I knew how to do to put less strain on the server. Then I went out of town for the weekend, and when I got back, the site was gone, replaced with a giant message for me to “contact the abuse department.” About 7000 visitors read that message about abuse.
When I contacted the abuse department (after being transfered about half-a-dozen times), they wouldn’t tell me that I was using too many resources. They wouldn’t tell me anything at all except that I needed to move my site somewhere else. They might be willing to put the site back up, but if they did and I “abused” them again, they would pull it permanently.
I knew I needed to move, but I had no idea where to go or how to move my site. At that time, my knowledge about transferring sites and databases was very low. I made an effort and destroyed the site, losing all my data.
I was furious and deeply depressed. I vowed revenge against that hosting company. I would tell the world about how crappy they were! But then something happened that changed my philosophy on that. I still wanted to have a site up, and this time I knew better than to trust most review sites. Now I did actual research. I learned about every different kind of hosting and found that I had made a stupid mistake when I picked my hosting company because I had picked the wrong type of hosting. To this day, I think the way that company, bluehost, handled the situation was abominable, but I realize now that the problem began because I was uninformed.
My focus moved from wanting revenge to wanting to inform people.
And so here I am, several years later, finally getting around to the task of building a site to help people make good decisions when they select their website hosting company. When I realized I could become an affiliate for these companies and make a small amount of money by referring customers to them, I felt conflicted. I knew that it wouldn’t compromise my honesty, but maybe it would look like my honesty was compromised.
In the end, I decided that I would just have to chance it. To work hard on a site like this and not try to make a little spending money isn’t hedging toward the safe side; it’s just stupid, particularly when you consider that I sign up for accounts at all these hosting companies just to try them out for you. That makes this little bit of web space not just time-consuming, but also pretty expensive.
So, there you have it. And if you think I’ve helped you with my reviews or design tips or traffic building suggestions, please help me out by clicking on my links when you buy your hosting. You’ll get the same price either way except on those occasions where I can find a coupon for you to use, and then you can get even better pricing through me than by going directly to the host. Plus, you’ll have my enduring thanks.
pz
