Review Hell Blog: Web Hosting

Earlier today, I had a funny yet equally annoying experience with a host’s customer support representative. I don’t like the host — they’re a really cheap “budget host” and they’ve demonstrated incompetence so many times. If I owned the account I’d move the websites away from them as soon as possible. Unfortunately the account is my friend’s and I would have to bear for a few more months with this host until the contract expires.

I’ve been feeling lazy all day and I’ve got no work to do, so I decided to read some web hosting reviews by other people. I was browsing through many sites including WebHostingTalk but the one site that made my day was WhoIsHostingThis.

At around 3 am EST yesterday, my brother and I were working on one of our sites when we experienced sudden slowness. We couldn’t publish articles, we couldn’t update pages, we couldn’t do anything productive at all. This was very unusual so we decided to wait it out a bit. A couple minutes passed and we were going to check again but to our surprise, the site was down! In fact, we found out all the sites in our account (including Review Hell) were down!

Last January, GoDaddy introduced a new product called “GoDaddy Managed WordPress Hosting.” They claim that this hosting plan is optimized for WordPress which means users can expect a boost in speed and overall performance. It’s generating a lot of buzz lately most probably because they’re selling a package that’s very similar to WPEngine‘s $29/month plan for about 1/4 of the cost!

I was browsing Reddit and I came across a very interesting story. It seems a guy had his web hosting account terminated for tweeting about a downtime issue!

Using unreliable web hosting will have a negative impact on your business sooner or later. It might be more disastrous if you chose to stick with a host just because you don’t want to be bothered with switching. It is well worth it in the long run and most web hosting companies will help transfer your site for free.

Sign #1: Your sites go up and down like a yoyo.

This one is a no-brainer. If your website is inaccessible at random times and your uptime monitor frequently emails you downtime notices, then it’s probably time to transfer to another host. Who knows how much sales you’re missing because your host can’t even do their primary job?

Around 6 months ago, I was tasked to build an e-commerce site for a client who said it was their first website and they were going to focus on it as their *only* business. Everything went well, from constructing what they wanted up to uploading and setting up the site. Eventually my client’s website became a successful local online business.

Stop googling the search term “best web host,” ’nuff said.

Yes, you read that right. It might seem confusing at first but this tip is actually one of the most effective tips when it comes to looking for a web hosting provider. If you constantly find yourself switching from one web host to another, then it must mean you haven’t found the best web host for you just yet.