Articles: Where are the Good Web Hosts?

This isn't so much of a how-to as a personal rant. Why does it seem so hard to find good web hosting? Back in the day when I purchased web hosting for tifa.net and ere-serene.org web hosting seemed to work a lot differently.

I first purchased domain hosting in March of 2001 from Host Excell (I guess, not to be confused with HostExcel... I had that confused for a while. I'm still confused!), back when they were a new and budding company. It was cheap hosting and they offered me unlimited bandwidth. At first I had no problems with them, but then my sites started getting more popular. Sometime in 2002, Ere Serene was generating about 8 GB of bandwidth a month. They then decided to suspend my account for no reason. I contacted them, they unsuspended it. Give another month, they suspend it again and when I contacted them, they just never replied. I got the feeling from their representatives that they were looking to get rid of me ever since I started generating a bit of bandwidth, even though I only hit about 8 GB and not anywhere close to what companies are offering now.

I've gone through a lot of web hosts and a lot of the same problems have come up. It's hard to find a good one, and in 2008 with so many more hosting companies out there, it's even harder to find one that you can trust.

The main problem and difference I see in hosts now is their impossible space and bandwidth allocations. Pretty much every affordable web host out there tells you that their plan - for $6.99 a month - includes 15 terabytes of space or so. That's 15,000 gigabytes! I doubt Neskaya.Net's content (excluding forums) will ever even go over one gigabyte. Most web sites use less than a hundred megabytes. These hosts also offer you around 15 terabytes of bandwidth! Yeah, right. At around 1,600 unique visitors per day, Ere Serene generated about 10 GB of bandwidth a month. And that's coming from a design site that offered free layout and graphic downloads.

So what's bad about offering more than anyone could ever chew? After all, it doesn't misrepresent anything, right? Well acutally it does. If hosts were only offering impossible amounts of space and bandwidth to make their plan look more pleasing, that'd be okay with me. But they don't even live up to what they say - try hosting a popular site on any of those accounts. A popular forum can generate a hundred GB of bandwidth a month easily. If you used their 15 TB space and bandwidth hosting for that, I'm guessing they'll be finding ways to suspend your account fairly quickly. ;)

What comes with this immense space and bandwidth is nitpicky and restrictive rules. For example, some hosts say that you can't host any files that are not used on your web site as their hosting is not a storage space. So, if I wanted to store some personal pictures in a gaming domain, that would technically be against their rules. Other hosts say that you can't use more than 1% of server resources at a time, or your account will be suspended. I don't know how many people you share the server with, but 1% is not too hard to use if you have an even semi-popular site. When your web site starts generating a lot of traffic and taking up a lot of space, you can bet that enforcement of these rules will become more and more strict.

For web hosting, you get what you pay for. Trust me on that; there's no way these hosts would stay in business if they allowed any site to use as much space and bandwidth as it needed. What makes me angry is that they feel the need to be so misleading about it, and that lots of people evidently buy it. At least back in the day, hosts gave you (mostly, my HostExcel experience shows differently) what they offered.

You can say that only popular sites or sites that generate a lot of bandwidth is affected and it'd be fine to host your web site with them if you just have a normal collective or personal site, but do you really want to be with a host that so outright misleads about their basic hosting package in the first place? I don't. Those are not good web hosts. Currently I'm hosted at Calindora, and although they may not give you the most space or bandwidth comparatively at least I know I'm getting what I'm buying. :) You can read more about Calindora here.

I call for the return of hosts that don't feel the need to mislead or lie. Good luck to you in your host searching!

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