2009-09-16 by  Amy Armitage

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A lot of Web hosting companies are offering unlimited disk space at cheap rates. Now, who wouldn’t want that? You benefit now and you benefit in the future, as you will no longer outgrow your hosting plan by embedding all those YouTube videos or high-resolution photographs from your Uncle Zadok on your personal site, or making all your corporate white papers available in full-color PDFs.

Unlimited bandwith, which once upon a time was called your transfer allowance, is also a no-brainer for both individuals and companies, as you are doubtless hoping to ramp your visitor numbers up from 312 a week to a million per day. Fact is, you’ll be ready for this with most plans, and most even offer easy-to-use site design tools as well as support for uploading your own home- or custom-made pages and media. You will certainly not see restrictions and limitations in this area very often, as it is the central raison d’etre for hosting companies. The problems usually arise in other areas, such as customer service, support and the responsiveness of your host to downtime and other problems.

What you don’t notice can hurt you. In many of the free hosting plans, there are hidden fees, up-front costs and other limitations that can quickly take the luster of that "great deal". You may not have noticed that you will be charged a hefty fee for your domain name, whereas you could have taken care of that yourself at any number of discount domain sites. The other thing you may not notice or may not give much importance to even if you do is the limited access to customer service and tech support personnel. This is something you simply cannot afford to overlook.

Some companies cut back on services that you might be expecting so that they can afford to make the unlimited offers of bandwidth and disk space. They may not have a toll-free number for customer support, and some many not provide a phone number at all, just a tack Web form or an e-mail contact. If you are crashing and burning when you try to upload to your site, or your server goes down, the last thing you need is to wait a day or two for a reply to your call for help.

Downtime, quite literally, can be a business killer. It is the Internet equivalent of your storefront being boarded up, or the block your building is on sinking into the La Brea tar pits, because the fact is, you just don’t exist anymore. To call this a frustrating situation is dramatically to minimize the possible effect. Losing a day’s sales, not to mention the opportunity to present your company to any number of new prospects, can be deadly for businesses, whether mature or new.

Customers, clients and even lookie-loos are exceptionally fickle, and the mood to shop, in particular, can really come and go without rhyme or reason. If it is not possible to access your site, these folks will find it way too easy to head elsewhere. You cannot afford this risk, much less the actual occurrence. You have to know that the site will be up and that any problems will be addressed immediately.

At first glance, you may not think it’s such a big deal that your host’s customer service and/or tech support are only available from 9am to 6pm (your time). The fact is, though, it is always noon somewhere on the planet, and that happens to be the reason you are on the Internet to reach the planet, to be available at any time to anyone, anywhere, right? You need to ensure that this is really the case before you pay your hard-earned dollars to any host.

A reputable hosting firm will have no qualms about giving you not just an estimate of their uptime percentage, but an actual report of their performance over the past month or year. You do not have to trust that the claims are accurate and not exaggerated, as there are third-party sites and auditing firms that report on the various hosting companies. Make sure to check the host’s claims against some of these neutral reports.

The bottom line is a simple, straightforward example of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Before you decide on a Web host, find out if you can get hold of customer service and tech support personnel on a 24/7/365 basis. Take your business elsewhere if you can’t, even if it costs a bit more. Think of the extra few dollars as insurance. Like any insurance, you can’t wait until you need it to buy it. Be prepared!

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