The web hosting business is as cut throat as they come. The margins are tight, the competition is high and hosting companies need to use every trick in the book to persuade customers to choose them. Here are some of the more popular lies told by hosting companies to get your business:
1. Unlimited Hosting
This is the favorite and biggest lie of all hosting companies. They offer you unlimited space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited add-on domains, unlimited everything. However the truth of the matter is that when you read the fine print (some of the more dodgy hosts don’t even have a fine print) you will find that ‘unlimited’ is subjected to fair use. So if you are taking up 50 GB of space for your websites you are likely to find that your account is shut down or you are asked to move to a Virtual Private Server. If you have a very popular site that takes a lot of server resources, you are likely to have the same situation. Remember: Unlimited hosting does not actually mean unlimited.
2. Hosting for just $3.50 per month
This is another favourite for all hosting companies. On their front page they will advertise very low rates, but what they don’t mention (or it’s buried deep in the Terms) until you go through the checkout process and get ready to pay is that you are not paying $3.50 each month, you are asked to pay $126 for 3 years of hosting which works out to $3.50. It’s very sneaky and catches a lot of people out. If you want to pay on a monthly basis the actual cost can be 3x higher. Keep this in mind when you are researching which host to choose – how many years are they asking you to pay for to get their advertised price.
3. 100% uptime guarantee
There is no such thing as 100% uptime because there are so many links in the chain to make your website available. Any company that offers a 100% uptime is lying to try and get your business. If they lease their servers from the datacenter, the datacenter could be hit by a powercut, the ISP could be hit with a routing problem, the DNS servers could go down. There are just too many things outside a web hosting company’s control that could go wrong for them to guarantee 100% uptime. The one exception is if the hosting company has your site hosted in multiple locations around the world and if one location goes down traffic is automatically rerouted, but this is generally only for the massive corporate sites.
4. Non Oversold Hosting
Many web hosts will claim that their servers are not oversold. Often this is a lie because when they lease a server it might come with a 500 GB hard drive and 5000 GB of bandwidth. If they offer unlimited hosting to 75 customers, they’ve already oversold their server. In most cases you probably won’t notice much difference, but there is always the chance that you are put on a server with another customer who uses a lot of computing resources which makes your website slow.
There are a number of other tricks that these companies have up their sleeves such as perpetual sales and limited time offers like free domains, but they are all gimmicks to get you to buy right away.