If you are a website owner, like most entrepreneurs you should be keeping an eye on the hosting provider to check if they are holding up to their promises or are they being easy on the website up-time. When considering an hosting provider, we will be impressed by looking at their promises such as 99.9% up-time, unlimited hosting etc, but we don’t realize the limitations associated with it which they don’t mention unless we ask them. Choosing the provider and a right hosting plan is a challenging task for many website owners, especially if they are doing it for the first time. The task has currently become even more complicated as there are numerous providers in the market with different hosting plans. Here, let us discuss some common mistakes that people often do while choosing a web host service :
Choose Cheap or Free Hosting Plans
While free services saves you few bucks on hosting plan, remember no service is offered free unless there is a benefit in it. Accepting free or cheap services is more or less equal to putting your business at risk because the site will not perform as you expected. Even if you come across slow loading speeds or frequent unexpected downtimes, you cannot question the provider because the service is a cheap deal. Since these hosting plans are designed to have low features, they will not be able to scale your website services as your business grows. In addition to that, your site will be used to display third party ads at no cost which means you are losing your brand value and promoting others through your website. You may not face all these complications at one time but gradually they will pop-up one-by-one making us feel bad for choosing the wrong company. If there any budget constraints on hosting plans, think about choosing a standard reasonable service rather than going for free or cheap hosting.
Do not check the company background
With a little bit of effort you can easily find one or two hosting packages that may sound reasonable for your website needs. However, figuring out whether these companies that you have selected are reliable or not requires some detailed research on reviews & complaints. It is a good idea to acquire the complete knowledge of each provider and compare them so that the website will not face any major risks in future. While looking out for negative reviews check if there are any service complaints, downtime issues or security breaches. If the reviews are overly hyped that is not a good thing, either. So until you find a good provider who can customize the features matching your business needs, keep searching for various options online.
Do not read through the terms and conditions properly
Most of the people just browse the highlighted points in Terms of service and generally ignore going through each sentence because they think it is not that important to read. There are many things that are important to be noted from customers point of view such as cancellation procedure and refund policy etc which comes handy when moving to new hosting provider. The agreement not only contains the up time percentage rate but also includes the refund amount that the company is going to pay if any losses are incurred due to unplanned downtimes. So before finalizing the hosting service and signing the paper work, take a few minutes to read through the terms and conditions thoroughly to avoid future confusion.