11 Things That Make a Web Hosting Company Suck
Posted on March 18, 2008
Filed Under reliable web hosting, web hosting |
Does your web hosting company suck? Plenty of them do and I have had the misfortune of running into them over the past decade as I have used numerous different web hosting firms for both personal, business, and client websites. Maybe I am just a difficult customer because I actually expect a company to deliver on their promises and because my background is in supporting websites for Fortune 500 companies? (I don’t think so) Although I’d love to name them all, I won’t because I still use some and don’t want any of my sites to mysteriously go offline.
So what kinds of things make a web host suck?
1. Screwing up a DNS transfer allowing a site to go down, then not having anyone in support to fix the problem. Earthlink did this to me back in 2000 I think. I don’t hold a grudge, but they never really owned up to it. I think they should stick to being an ISP and not trying to be a web host. In my genius, I had them transfer it on New Years Eve since I figured there would be little traffic, but instead, I got paged at about 2AM while at a party by the company who actually helped fix the problem (kudos to HostMySite for stepping in and taking care of that). I also stayed on hold with Earthlink for three hours (using my cell phone and a headset) while I conducted a training class and never got a response.
2. Having your site go down in the middle of a press release, but not due to high volume of traffic. One day back in 2006, I had a press release go out and as I was checking the site, I noticed it was down. I called the company and they gave me some lame excuse about a script running on another machine on the same box. Ahh, excuse me? Why not turn their site off instead of letting mine go down (clown). Or better yet, transfer me to another box.
3. Have your web host not perform maintenance after hours. One day, actually earlier this year, I had a killer blog post (not on this blog) and when I went to the site later and noticed it was down. I thought to myself, well it was good, but it didn’t get enough traffic to bring it down. I contacted the host and they told me they were doing maintenance. Hmm, no warning and no website and much of the US was still awake. Bad call.
4. Not having your stats tracking unless you go in and manually turn them on. Just dumb - Thanks iPower.
5. Shutting down your website even after you have paid your bill because their email system sucks and they didn’t realize they got paid (and not at the last minute either). Thanks again iPower.
6. Having mail servers that delay and lose mail then claiming to not actually have a problem. Also, getting phone calls from your friends saying “dude, your email bounced back” (happened today).
7. Blocking ISP’s from sending or receiving mail from their network.
8. Having incompetent web hosting technical support staff that arrogantly claim to know the answers when they are wrong. With a little knowledge, you gloat and send them the trace route to show that they are wrong - dead wrong.
9. Making it really hard to cancel then continually billing you for services you don’t want. Thanks 1&1.
(I recently had a colleague mention that she was having problems with them as well, so it made me feel like I wasn’t totally off base).
10. Web Hosting companies that host adult sites and other corrupt sites that you wouldn’t want to be linked to without being open about it.
11. Web hosts that don’t use any kind of server monitoring. I have had to call various web hosts to ask about whether or not they were having server problems, only to be adamantly told that they weren’t, only to later be told that they were. For the love of all that is sacred folks, please know the status of your friggin network before answering the phone.
So after all of this, who do I recommend? HostGator. That’s who this site is hosted on and for as little as $7.95 per month, you can host multiple sites on the same account. This is great for those starting out and want to launch multiple websites or blogs for one low fee. And yes, that is a HostGator affiliate link. Why shouldn’t I get paid for saving you lots of trouble?
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2 Responses to “11 Things That Make a Web Hosting Company Suck”
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This is a great piece and solid info for those who need to know. There are so many hosts out here but little info to help people figure out what is wrong or what is missing. Cant remember how many times so many of these have shown the ugly side of a company face. Thanks for the great breakdown.
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This is why I got tired of hosting companies and decided to purchase a server. We went with Server Intellect and couldn’t be happier. The best thing about a server is you dont have to worry about someone else’s website taking your down because they are using to many resources. Or a hosting company taking you down because they have updates to complete. Never again!