HostLuck.com - What you need from a web hosting company?

Hi,
I am tring to make a list of web hosting requirements to provide everything that a webmaster wants.
Any tips?

Here's the List I made

1. Good Uptime [99.9% uptime]
2. Quick and Smart Support
3. Cheap Price
4. Webmaster tools, like website builder.
5. No hidden limits like limit to number of mysql database, AddonDomains, Park Domains etc.

Is there something else a webmaster would like to have from his web hosting company?

 

Reputation and assurance that the company is in it for the long haul.

Reseller hosting with 10GB of transfer is absolute rubbish.

 

Why so? There are people who want to start web hosting with small plans due to small funding. ($2.99/month) [link]
Also there are many who have multiple site's who instead of using unlimited addon feature, prefer to have seperate cpanel accounts for each site and whm features too.

For Serious resellers, there are plans of
150 Gb disk Space and 1500 Gb bandwidth from $15.99/month
or
500 Gb diskspace and 5000 Gb bandwdith for $159.99/Year

Or one can even go for dedicated servers.

Reputation and assurance are really very important, which can be build with quality service and lots of hard work, I agree to that.

 

10GB is just way too low compared to the major players in the web hosting industry. I get 5TB+ from Dreamhost for $10 per month, I only use about 0.5-1TB of that though, I'm also not sure if it's reseller.

But when you compare 5,000GB for $10 to 10GB for $2...10GB seems insufficient.

 

I need those thing but now my hosting is lacking it
-FFMPEG support youtube site
-Cpanel
-24/7/365 live help
-Free script installation
-Can use up to last byte of the promised bandwidth/storage
-MSN support
-Special offer for loyal customer

 

No It's not reseller. Reseller is where customer's actually use the total amount of space and bandwdith. We also have 5TB plans but at some genuine rate where real value could be actually provided.

There are many site's which have high bandwidth usage but they are suspended after a certain usage of bandwidth or resource.
Read this (link)
Article is written badly by someone, but some true insights.

Though your answer is simple, it was somewhat insightful.


-FFMPEG support youtube site - FFmpeg Hosting Plans
-Cpanel - Yup.
-24/7/365 live help - costly to apply, but can really help to boost client's satisfaction.
-Free script installation - Hmm.. Good one again
-Can use up to last byte of the promised bandwidth/storage - Good, but I can assure there are very few who doesn't do overselling. I'll always try my best to provide this. But there are many who dont know the truth of web hosting world and would get attracted to 5Tb bandwidth at $10 gimmicks.
-MSN support - Equivalent to live support.
-Special offer for loyal customer - Really true, Building good relations with gratitude is what counts the most.

Thanks, your answers helped. repped!

Actually, all repped!
Yet looking for some more tips.

 

Reputation is very important for me

 

reputation can be bought , if you have money you can buy almost everything, reviews, reputation, ideas.

 

Customer Feedback for all to see.
Proof of competence by 3rd party websites. I.E 100% Uptime
Non-Overselling
Quick Fast Responsive Support
Competitive Pricing and Offers.

These are important to me as webmaster. Footylad

 

Really true, Cant agree more.
I'll share one of my experience here. I have seen one of the most popular web hosting site, owning several review web site, some are the most popular.
What they do is write negative reviews for all the webhosting companies except the owning web hosting company.
The most quickest way to find the truth is to see where the review site is hosted using 'Whois'. But That could be masked too.

Quite True, Except the 100% uptime stuff. Its practically impossible because periodical server reboots are necessary for smooth functioning of the server.
All Repped.

 

Ensure that overselling is either nonexistent or very limited!

 

Agreed. Oversellling is a two way sword.

 

hi,

support all the time not every now & then & cheap prices & bandwidth

 

Thanks, I think I have covered it.

 

Hi,

To provide some background I have been working in the hosting industry for some years and have a fair bit of experience of how things work behind the scenes.

To be completely honest you will not get reliable hosting with good support for the prices you are used to paying.

Reliable support

Most larger companies tend to hire average or below average technical support workers from around to globe who work for around $8-10/h.

These technicians to be able to solve your problems effectively need to understand the following throughly:

Networking (Networking Engineer I $53,153 salary USD)
DNS (bind)
HTTP (Apache)
FTP (Proftpd/pure-ftpd)
SMTP (exim,postfix)
POP
IMAP
Linux (Linux System Administrator I $55,000 typical USD)
Mysql (Mysql DBA $70,000 typical USD)

* These numbers were pull of random sites on the internet and were not verified.

Not only must they have a decent understanding of all of the above but they are typically expected to support 3rd party scripts that customers that have no idea how to use install on the account.

Larger companies often simply just acquire more staff and hope that one of their support technicians stumble onto a solution before the customer leaves.

reliable hosting

Because of the extremely excessive resource expectations of most customers corners have to be cut somewhere and usually this comes at the expense of reliability.

Biggest problem I've seen is that they do not properly plan and implement their network infrastructure. This simply could be because they are too cheap or simply don't know any better. (Anyone with a proper understanding of Networking would know better).

Hosting is done on cheap and power full servers with as much disk space as they can cram into them so they can fit more customers on them.

Uptime

Another thing you should be weary of is most if not all providers define Uptime as non-scheduled down time. What this means is they could take your server down every day for 1 hour a day and as long as they notified you beforehand they could still claim 100% uptime.

Cheap, quality, quantity; pick two.

 

Add affiliate program.
Im sure people will be happy to help you promote it and make some money along the way to help your business grow.

 

I always had it in mind, but kept postponing. Probably the best marketing strategy. Will do soon.
All Repped!

 

Being in the web hosting industry for 4 years, I can say that your info is true upto a certain extent.
But being a positive believer of change and innovation, I think its quite easy to give cheap prices, quality and quantity all together if resources are managed properly infact creatively. Though I agree most popular companies are not doing it. Sad but true.
Cheap technology with quite smart technical staff covers most of the prices.
Any staff could be trained using the large pool of information available on the internet. Almost 90% of problems in server administration could be solved just googling.

 

lol but try using all of that 5tb of bandwidth and see what happens, your account will be shutdown after about 100gb...


btw i think that 10gb reseller plans are the bomb.. i dont like spending a lot of money when i don't need the space. If i didn't just signup with someone else yesterday i would buy from you.

 

"I only use about 0.5-1TB of that though" - 0.5-1TB = 500GB-1000GB. I believe DreamHost will allow you to reach their bandwidth and space limits, the main cause of them shutting down your account would be excessive CPU/Database usage. But even then they warn you before shutting down your account.

I've been warned twice by DreamHost for using too much resources (CPU and MySQL), and both times I fixed the problem and have been using my account successfully since.

It's great value at $10 per month. Their support is good and their hosting is good too.