Web hosting companies operate in a very competitive industry where profit margins are low and money is only made when services are sold in volume. They have to employ all manner of sneaky ways to get you to part with your money and increase your lifetime value to them. Here are some of the ways they will try and get more money out of you, and how you should avoid it.
1. Offer you a free domain when you signup
Virtually every hosting company will offer you a free domain when you signup. While this may save you a few dollars in the short term, the company will bill you each year to renew the domain. The price they charge can be more than double the cost of the domain if you were to buy it from a dedicated domain registration company. On top of that they offer a whois privacy service which comes free from many domain registration sites. The final kick in the teeth is if you try and transfer the domain to your own control they ask you for a fee to do this.
2. Offer search engine submission services
This is something that is becoming more common, hosting companies will try and promote their ‘search engine submission’ service which guarantees submission to hundreds of search engines. The truth is that search engine submission hasn’t worked since the late 90′s and there is only one search engine that matters: Google. Web hosts charge $50 or more for this service which is almost certainly automated and definitely useless.
3. Green hosting plans
Jumping onboard the Green bandwagon, web hosts have started to offer environmentally friendly hosting alongside their regular hosting – you even get a small graphic you can display on your website to show everyone how green you are. The truth is that very often the server is located in the same datacenter and they are just buying electricity from renewable resources like solar and wind to help power the datacenter. Other companies are using carbon offsetting by promising to plant trees to absorb the carbon – thus making your hosting ‘green’. Nevermind about the environmental damage that has gone in to making the datacenter, creating the server hardware, the diesel generator backup and what happens to the server once it’s reached the end of its life.
4. Purposefully limiting computer resources
With so many hosting companies offering ‘unlimited’ hosting, they are using this as a lure to get customers who would otherwise have chosen a more expensive option like a VPS or reseller hosting. What these companies then do is limit the amount of computing power you are allowed to use which makes your website run slow. When you submit a ticket they will say your website requires a VPS or dedicated server. Another way they limit you is by Inodes, which basically means the number of files uploaded and downloaded from your websites. Once you hit this limit you’ll find an email asking you to upgrade to a more expensive server. Very sneaky – which is why you need to email the host and find out about these limits before signing up.
All of these sneaky tricks can be avoided if you are armed with the right information and ask the web host questions before you buy.