I’ve Got 99 Problems, but a Host Ain’t One

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Check out all the features a web hosters offers to make sure they really work. Tips here from Ian Felton include keeping control of your domain name and verifying their email capabilities. Oh, yeah, and he makes a suggestion related to insanity that

I’ve Got 99 Problems, but a Host Ain’t One

At this point in the web hosting business, it’s a buyer’s market. With hundreds of people running hosting businesses out of their basements, offering the same services as bigger companies at a fraction of the cost, most businesses can have even a high-trafficked site hosted for under $100 a year.

To be competitive, a hosting business must offer a large amount of storage space (usually around a gig) and plenty of bandwidth. In addition, Perl, PHP and MySQL are almost the industry standard installations on commercial web farm servers. If a web host doesn’t provide the general features: control panel, databases, statistics, SSH at least 100 email addresses and sub-domains, they are below standard.

The good news is that there are hundreds of companies offering all of the above and more for next to nothing. However, to get into a situation that will actually work out over the period of time in the contract, a savvy web host customer should do several things and ask several questions to the sales rep before handing over the plastic. Even though on the surface these companies appear to be alike, there are vast discrepancies in the philosophies that actually run these companies, and it can be a big surprise to some customers at just how inconvenient some hosts can make it to have your site living on their Internet space.

First, never let a web hosting company have control over your domain name. A popular marketing strategy for many web hosts is to provide you with a ‘free’ domain name when you sign up for their hosting. Bad idea. As soon as you let most hosts register your domain, they have control of it. They may not even let you keep the domain if you decide to move to a different server. If they register the domain, they may very well not allow anyone to change the DNS servers in the record, which means that as long as you like your domain name, you will host your site on their machine.

What kind of customer service do you think you will receive after attempting to move your site somewhere else? Make sure you register your domain by whatever means necessary so that you can freely change DNS servers and not lose ownership of the address you have worked so hard to make popular.

Second, ask detailed questions that go beyond covering the services mentioned on the company web site. Just because a company offers 10,000 email addresses doesn’t mean that their email service even works.

I’ve signed up for hosting before, got up-and-running and then sent out a newsletter to a thousand people on my list. How do you think I felt about the great deal I got when half of them bounced back because the web host’s email server was black-listed? Yes, I had 10,000 email addresses. Too bad none of them could reliably send emails to other people.

In that same vein, ask about potential problems with sending out newsletters. Several AOL users on my list, instead of unsubscribing using the correct method, were repeatedly clicking the big ‘SPAM’ button that AOL has conveniently placed to encourage their users to anti-spam every competing company out of existence.

So after I sent out a newsletter, the next morning I woke up to find that my domain had been suspended for ‘spamming.’ Instead of all my users coming to my site to see all the improvements I made, they saw a big “NOTICE: This domain has been suspended. Please contact the billing department immediately.” It wasn’t good enough that they shut down my service, they had to make it appear that I couldn’t afford to pay my bill. How many users do you think I lost over that one?
The third step is maintaining good rapport with your hosting company. Once a host passes all the tests and you have signed up with them, be sure to remain very cordial. The people on the other end have a lot of power over your site's uptime and how quickly and thoroughly they respond to your needs. However, if you find that your host is being overbearing or snide, you must make them believe that you are crazy.

If the domain you registered with them is something like luvmypets.com, you absolutely must register a second domain and have it pointed to your account. The second domain should be something like, mercenarykillersclub.org or satanismycopilot.net. Whenever you call about your account, don't use the nice name, use the crazy name. It's worth the $12 a year fee.

Don’t mess around with this step or you might find yourself being talked down to by the typical arrogant systems administrator who will be working on your account. If you even hear a hint of condescension in the tone of voice on the other end of the phone, start talking to yourself and say things like, “I hope I don’t have to drive over there. That means I have to steal some gas and stop by Bubba’s first.” Then act as if you didn’t say anything and say, “What did you just say?” Make sure you sound completely annoyed. You're probably wondering if I am serious or kidding. That's exactly how you want to make a testy web hosting support person feel so that you don't get walked all over while keeping them on their toes.

If you follow these tips you can avoid being a turnip on a web farm. If you spend the time to really refine your approach, you may find that the support people immediately jump on your requests. Remember, it’s the year 2004 and if you want good hosting service, you have to have game. Good luck!