Web Hosting Secrets Revealed - Must read before selecting your next host

As I'm sick of seeing hosting individuals (not companies) offering unlimited or one time payment hosting over DP and many other web master forums, I had to react.

From my own experience I'll be guiding you through the process of choosing the best web host for your sites and telling you about how the thing works from the company point of view and the client point of view hoping that this guide will give every web master a better hosting experience.

1- Selecting your web host and testing the water.

A. Reviews.
Actually the hosting reviews don't always offer a complete fair image about the web host because you might read a bad review written by a bad customer in nature where the client is the problem not the company itself (trouble makers exist every where) and this might give you a bad impression about a good company.

B. Test it yourself.
I find testing it yourself is the better approach. why? because what doesn't work for others may work for you and vice versa. but i don't mean here that If you read bad reviews all the time about a company then you must try it yourself!

Instead, look for a contact us info and drop them an e-mail with your inquiries (or worries) that made you change your web host. make sure you assure that the good things about your previous host exist at their host as well.

C. Response Quality.
After you get a reply from them, check if their reply was informative, in order and complete.

This is to ensure that they have high quality staff and this gives you an image about how your support tickets will be handled after you join them.

D. Response Speed.
Response speed is another factor that you should look at, see how much time did it took them to respond. Sometimes you might find a response within few minutes and sometimes after few hours depending on some factors like the number of tickets in the queue and the number of staff embers online to respond at this time. On average a reply within 8 hours is fairly good but you shouldn't complain if you get a response within few minutes

2- Company History and resources.

Old or new company ? actually both have good and bad points.

Old company will be overloaded with clients and sites and you may notice slow response on tickets (sometimes more than a day to respond) or else you find 600 sites hosted with you on the same server.
Old companies are more stable when it comes to your data security and regular backups. your billing data (if you pay using credit card ) is more secure and private.

New companies are usually good when it comes to performance because they are not overloaded with sites and they are more to respond faster to the tickets since they don't have long ticket queue.
New companies may have less professional staff but this is not a must since some ex staff from reputed companies open their own companies and they can provide good service within their small new company.

3- Cheap Or Expensive ?

Firstly, Expensive is no guarantee for quality. some hosts are expensive just for the reason that they have tight resources (maybe just resellers) so they can't offer you better prices or else they will be losing. However, this doesn't mean that hosts which offer huge resources are really good (read the coming part)

If you are running after the 1$/year kind of hosting then you will be suspended within few weeks and please don't complain about it because dirt cheap hosting offers dirt cheap reliability

4- Overselling Space and bandwidth.

Did you put in mind that it costs money for companies to get servers ? If so then how come you find some of them offering unlimited, unmetered and one time (lifetime) offers ? They pass this cost to you with some margin of profits attached.

Here is the truth about it.

A. Do you see a hard disk with unlimited space in the market ?
B. Do you have an internet connection that has unlimited speed at your IPS ?
At some point, there must be a limit no matter how big are the resources the company has and those resources cost money (assuming the company doesn't steal the equipment )

If the usual dedicated servers come with 2500GB bandwidth and at least will cost 100$ with the control panel then how do you expect them to really give you 1000GB for 5$ or 10$ losing 50$ with every shared account they sell ?

This is called overselling

Assuming a company has 10GB hard disk and 100GB bandwidth allocated to one of it's servers and that they offer a plan with 1GB space and 10GB bandwidth.

They should sell only 10 packages of this plan. Right ? NO WRONG

Depending on the fact that not all the clients will hit their limit every month, then there will be unused resources that the company can use to gain more profits.

Some companies will sell 12 packages of this plan other might sell 15 and others will sell 20 or even more.

Once one of the clients try to reach his limit that he paid for it, they suspend his account saying it is using RAM or CPU (something the customer can't verify it) since you can see your disk/bandwidth usage from your control panel but not your account CPU & RAM usage.


5- How to know if a hosting is overselling ?

A. Giving unlimited and unmetered resources or on time payment etc...
B. Giving too much limits like 1000GB bandwidth for shared hosting.
C. Compare shared with reseller plans for the same company, if you find too much difference in the allowed resources, then this company is overselling to the bone.
D. Compare the disk space/ bandwidth ratio. Since hosting companies don't usually oversell space because you can use it for backup purposes, then there must be a good ratio between the space and bandwidth

1/10 is the usual thing and 1/15 is better but anything from 1/30 or more like 1/50 it too good to be true

Hosts who oversell will mostly have a part in their TOS not allowing you to host file/image hosting sites or will not allow you to use your account for backup purposes so you don't hit your limits and cause them loss.


I hope this gave you better idea about web hosting and I wish you a happy hosting experience

 

WOW!

You really opened my eyes man. Thanks a lot for this... Some companies do oversell, they are so interested in getting more clients and shoving those clients in one server that they forget about their quality. Ahh well, I think you will have a new client soon.

Thanks bro,
neverstudy

 

People just love to be promised of something big thanking they are smart to get big thing for less price but th hidden fact is that they won't get more than they really deserve

I'm glad the thread was informative and looking forward to hosting you

 

thank you for posting this..

I'll lay the cards on the table, I was one of the people thinking that I'm getting great deals with my hosting company, they took me for a sucker and got lucky with some cross-selling....

now it's time to study their policies and give them hell


Thanks for posting, it's much much appreciated information.

 

Great post, my man...

The only thing I would point out, is that every host over-sells. It's the nature of the business, and if we didn't we wouldn't make any money

So, then the question is, to what degree?
The hosts that massively over-sell are the ones ruining the industry and preying on the ignorance of customers that simply don't know any better.

ps.. repped

 

Yes, its the nature of the industry but the degree varies

but those who say unlimited and 3000Gb and such, are really overselling to a silly degree


I made this post to warn people as much as i can and shed some light upon the situation because when a client is burnt by one of those hosters, he just thinks they are bad host not knowing that he can control this and go to a rational company with high quality standards.

He just thinks unlimited and such offers are good and they are standards while it's not the case

but in the end, those overselling companies have a customer base that loves to be fooled

PS: rep added to the cute boobs in your avatar

 

Thanks, thats a nice one. I specially like the overselling comments and the stupid one time payment/host forever cheats comment.

 

On the subject of overselling, my experience with VPS hosting is that the popular virtualization technologies
permit overselling. However, XEN virtualization uses hard limits on the resources, and cannot be oversold.
After trying various VPS, I found that a XEN VPS with 384 MB RAM vastly outperformed another VPS with 512 RAM.
Another point to note about overselling is that Hard disk Swap space is also passed off as Memory. Let us say a Server has 4 GB RAM, it will have a 2 or 3 times larger Swap Space, and the total 12-16 GB (RAM+Swap) is sub-divided and sold as Memory.

Kuldeep

 

Hi,

I had the experience of going for a much acclaimed host that has been heavily promoted as being reliable- and took out a shared hosting plan paid 18 months ahead.Everything look real good on the surface, and the response to emails was good.

Barely a week into the hosting, the hosting service suspended my account because they had a quota on the RAM resources - this was not mentioned at all in the first place, and the host provider did not even give a warning. Their claim was that every shared host should not exceed 10% of the RAM resources at any one time, and just suspended the account when one of my site which had some Youtube videos was said to have used around 29% of their RAM resource, but I had lots of bandwidth and storage space still un-utilized as I was only a week into the hosting service, and all the host provider wanted was for me to upgrade to the more expensive VPS.

So have to exercise more care as to the policy on RAM resources if you are using a shared host.

 

Exactly, Tech Entrance - fyi, those boobs aren't mine lol

dascore
Your experience is exactly what is wrong here.
Bandwidth is completely tied to cpu and memory. The more bandwidth you use, the more cpu and memory you will use. So you can easily hit the resource limit before you even come close the the bandwidth you were promised.

 

The problem is that the clients always look at the bandwidth and space while there are several elements in the hosting business to look at

It is just lack of information problem

 

Sorry to hi-jack this thread..but what are your opinions on server colocation???

 

Overselling exists on all kind of hosting

on colocation, you get 100mbps or 1gbps shared between many servers (here is the way to oversell ) or else you pay about 1500-2500$ for a dedicated connection (for large video streaming sites)


Edit...

Overselling is being done on all the hosting business phases, shared/reseller/vps/dedicated

The only one that is not being oversold is the data center itself, they oversell but they don't get oversold (hoping i phrased it right)

 

have a look at some secrest here too http://www.mydosty.com/some-secrest.php

 

secrest ?

Page Not Found error, probably not the best secret...

 

Nice one Tech Entrance..

Though i d like to ask one thing...i started searching a lot On Unmetered b/w not Unlimited diskspace..and i found out that unmetered plans are INDEED avaialble from LT and other data center providers,

though i agree with you that most of these hosting people are just in rush to make quick money by selling one time payments etc..

but some hosts do provide unmetered bandwidth.. i feel...but not all though..right?

Coz technically if you are sitting on a 100 mbps uplink...it could be unmetered...thats what i think frm what i found on the internet..even Layered Tech sells some plans with unmetered b/w is that fraud or something? i dont think so...

 

Just one comment to the old/new advice.
I strongly advice to use old hosts that you know are stayers in the business. There are so many new come and goers and you dont have time to waste on finding a new host every third month. Go for the old companies that has been around for at least two years.

 

Well, unmetered is a bit different from unlimited.
Unmetered just means they don't keep track of the bandwidth you use.

Make sure you have a look at the TOS. Unmetered might mean you are using bandwidth from a "lesser" provider and the uptime might be 95% instead of 99.9%

 

Well see here's the issue. The datacenter is giving the server owner a fixed pipe of 10mbit or 3.2TB. Sounds great it's unmetered (not really it's just a fixed pipe). So coming into a shared environment with the machine on 10mbit port. It says unmetered bandwidth, but how much? The port is clearly capped on the machine so what is your actual bandwidth pushing cap? Is it 10mbit the entire server or is it much less due to the 200 other people attempting to push 10mbit as well. So you're actually getting something like 0.05mbit of guaranteed bandwidth or maybe if you're lucky some don't use it and you get a bit more. So what you actually end up with is something like 16GB of bandwidth and you have no real room to burst. Also with this you have the 199 other users probably also attempting to put their file site on there or their image site. So the server could very well get very very slow due to there being no head room.

Doesn't sound like it's very reliable now does it? At least with the host selling you either x mbit or x GB you have an actual number. There are lots of hosts selling unreliable hosting with actual numbers to, but just look around and see just how many more reliable fixed bandwidth hosts there are compared to unmetered and unlimited.

 

Well, for a shared hosting environment, the company can get a 10mbps connection and offer unlimited bandwidth to the clients but when the server has good number of sites and in rush hours the speed will be almost killed

unmetered bandwidth exists but it's either controlled by TOS or connection speed

in both cases you won't be getting what you think you are getting u know

for a company to get 100mbps completely dedicated connection to a server, that would cost anything from 1000$-2500$ depending on the bandwidth provider

now much much do they have to bill the clients to get him hosted on a server with those costs ?

the common sense now is getting a server on a shared 100mbps connection capped by monthly bandwidth usage for every server