Common Mistakes to Avoid
With so much information out there on web hosting, it’s easy to get confused and make mistakes. Addressed below are some of the more common mistakes to avoid when looking for hosting.
Shopping By Price
While no one wants to over pay for hosting services, going for the absolute cheapest option can be a big mistake, the biggest of which is customer service.
The most expensive option isn’t necessarily the best either. To find the right service for you, talk with other people who have web sites.
Talking with some web development companies can really help too, as they have had customers with many different companies and deal with the issues of what works and what doesn’t every day.
Affiliate Reviews
There are many sites out there offering the “top 10” reviewed hosting companies. The problem here is most of these are actually selected based on the highest commission paid to them should they make a referral leading to a sale.
Instead, look for reviews from people who have actually used the hosting service before. By the way, the hosting companies I have linked to in various articles on this site have all been an experience of hosting my own sites, or customers I work with in my job as a web developer.
There is nothing wrong with affiliate links and reviews in general, just the sites who prioritize commissions over the experience their visitors will have. In fact, we use affiliate links on this site when linking to hosting companies. We need to keep the lights on here somehow :)
Getting the Wrong Hosting Plan
If you are running an existing site with a fair amount of traffic or complexity, shared hosting probably won’t work out so well for you. Make sure to evaluate your options carefully and select the correct plan for your site. Check out the different types of hosting in this guide for more information.
If you need help, there are many people out there who are more than happy to provide some good information. Community forums and Q&A sites are some good places to get some help. You are more than welcome to contact us as well, and we will try to help in any way we can.
Free Domains
Many companies advertise a free domain name when purchasing a hosting package from them. This isn’t really a good idea for several reasons:
- Domains are inexpensive
- You will have more control if you use a registrar, rather than a hosting company
- It will be easier to move to a different hosting company, should things not work out. You won’t have to transfer the domain to a new company.
“Unlimited” offers
It’s very common to see “unlimited” under certain features of a hosting plan, such as disk space, bandwidth, websites, etc.
“Unlimited” is always limited in some way and is really just a fancy marketing tactic. If you check the hosting terms of service for the company, there will be some language in there specifying vague limits for their “unlimited” service.
If your site uses too many resources (disk space, file size, bandwidth, memory, CPU time, etc) they may give you warnings or cancel your hosting service. This is generally true of any shared hosting.
VPS and Dedicated hosting plans don’t run into these problems, as the server resources are dedicated, and not shared.