Website Hosting 101: Deals that are too good to be true

It's not uncommon these days to find unbelievable hosting deals. Vendors are practically giving you unlimited resources for next to nothing.

The most common boast is that you will have unlimited data transfer, and this sounds like a good deal, right? Especially when its only for a couple of bucks a month. Let's explore the technical and economic aspects of these types of deals for moment...

You can think of bandwidth as a hosepipe that allows the flow of a certain amount of water through it. When someone tells you that you have unlimited transfer they are most often telling the truth. They don't put a cap on the amount of data you can transfer, but that's not to say there isn't a limit.

Any hosting service will have a finite bandwidth connection to the Internet backbone. Most likely this is going to be lightning fast too. So what's the problem? Because they are practically giving away their service, in order to make money, they have to cram a huge number of people into that resource to make it profitable. So you, as one person out of thousands, are now competing with thousands of other people for a finite number of resources.

It's the equivalent of your local municipality announcing that everyone can have as much water as they can possibly use for a small fixed rate. The municipality can only supply the water at a certain rate, so everyone opens the taps expecting a torrent and only a trickle comes out. From the vendors' point of view, they haven't lied; but from the customer's point of view you certainly aren't getting what you expect - then again, you haven't really paid for it in the first place.

The situation gets even worse because, as a webmaster, you will need support. If you're paying $3 a month for the service, a single support request that takes them about ten minutes to handle will most likely wipe out their profit for that month. So how do they do it? Most often, they don't offer any support whatsoever and this is not a good thing at all.

In hosting, like practically everything in life, you get what you pay for. The real trick to getting a good host is to look carefully at what they are offering and think about how that can meet your requirements. If you think you are going to need a helping hand, by default, you are looking at a slightly more pricey package because it means there has to be a knowledgeable, paid employee on the other end of the line.

That's not to say you can't find genuinely fantastic deals. Many companies strive to provide an excellent and cost effective service - we have a couple listed on Site prebuilder. It just pays to be aware that you do need to separate the wheat from the chaff before putting money on the table.