The first thing we wish to say about hosting is Be careful who you choose to host your site!!

PLEASE READ THIS PAGE!!
It may save you a lot of time and money. We have heard some horrible stories from clients that moved to us from other hosts. These are just some of the hosting tricks they fell for.

In the past people have said to us "We've seen cheaper elsewhere!" They are very correct, and we are not ashamed in the slightest. We don't do cheap hosting we do quality hosting with REAL support at affordable prices.

All our clients sites are hosted on our own dedicated top of the range servers. DO NOT be fooled by companies that offer you enormous hosting packages very cheaply. There are some major pit falls you should know about before you buy a big, cheap hosting package. Please read on this is IMPORTANT!!......

Is The Web Host Telling The Truth?

Surely they must be? Not at all! Many web hosts are literally selling lies. Let's look at the two basic things offered with cheap or large hosting packages:

Large Amounts Of Or Unlimited Disc Space

Companies who sell you mounds of web space for next to no money are deceiving you period. It is a simple matter of economics and mathematics. A quality dedicated server costs on average $130 per month. (Not including server maintenance fees). Just like your pc, a server has hard drives which have a certain amount of space, normally around 80GB.

Let's say a hosting company is offering 5GB of space for $10 per month. That means they can fit 16 sites on that server before all the hard drive space is spoken for. 16 sites x $10= $160 revenue per month, for a $130 outlay? It just doesn't fit does it? $30 profit? What about paying the support staff, server engineers and electricity each month?

So how are they making money? Simple they "over sell" the space. To make a reasonable profit at those prices they will need at least 50 sites on one server. (some will have many more) 80GB of space divided by just 50 sites is 1.6 GB each, so how can you possibly have 5GB available to you? It is quite simply deceit. They are telling you you have more than is available and are hoping you don't try to use your 5GB.

Quite apart from that you don't need 5GB of Space. The average size of a web page with images is 50kb, to use up 5GB of space at 50kb per page, your site would have to have 200,000 pages silly isn't it? 1GB of space is plenty for a very big site. One of our clients sells hundreds of downloadable e-books his total site size is 248MB.

Bandwidth / Traffic

This too is grossly oversold by most hosts. For a host bandwidth is gold dust. A decent shared server will come with about 800GB per month. Again the hosts offering you 80GB a month are not telling the truth, 800GB divided by just 50 sites is 16GB a month each (that's what you have available no matter what they say).

Bandwidth is VERY expensive if the server gets near its 800GB limit before the end of the month, the owner has to buy more, an extra 100GB of bandwidth to add to their 800GB is approximately $110 extra on the server bill. Do you think they are going to buy that to keep your $10 account going? We had one new client come to us that had hosting account with 75GB of bandwidth per month. Her site got busy she used just 2GB of that bandwidth in 3 days, the host without informing her, suspended her site because they said the traffic to her site was "using too many resources".

Obviously they had a lot of accounts on their server and were guarding the bandwidth. They don't want to pay $110 extra to keep a $10 account. ALWAYS READ THE SMALL PRINT BEFORE BUYING!!! Somewhere on the site of each host, usually in the small print of the terms of service that people rarely read, it will mention usage of server resources. The following is a direct quote from one of the webs biggest shared hosting companies.

"Users may not use more than 5% of system resources for over 90 seconds."

Watch out for those clauses. Again you don't need massive bandwidth 500 unique visitors will only use around 150MB.

Host Or Reseller?

Is the company offering you the hosting account actually a host, or are they a reseller? Many cheap packages are offered by the latter. The diffrence is simple but important. Resellers are not hosts they are simply selling a bigger hosts services. They have no direct access to the server, for example they can not restart the server if it needs rebooting. They can not install server software or change the servers configuration if needed.

This seriously affects support. If you contact a reseller with a problem, and it is a server issue, they have to contact the host that provides their reseller account and report the problem. Companies that service the resellers have thousands of customers of their own, and probably hundreds of resellers therefore support is rarely fast, but to make it worse your issue has to be sent forward and backward via another person, slowing the process even more.

Anyone can buy a reseller account for about $30 a month, and many do that's why there is so much cheap hosting around. I hate to say this again, but let's do more math, how many resellers would you need on a decent server to make a profit? 15 perhaps? 15 people selling webspace to just 15 clients each thats 225 sites on one server, start dividing the bandwidth and space by 225 sites it's scary. Bear in mind the big hosting companies may well put the resellers on lower grade, slower servers to keep their own profits high. How hard do you think it would be to use over 5% of the server resources then?

2001 Web runs it's own DEDICATED servers. We have full access to our servers 24/7 what's more we are backed by a full team of highly professional server engineers. We host only our clients, no resellers, no over selling. We offer quality hosting! The resources we say you have you actually have. If you ever need more you upgrade. If you get really big we will set up a dedicated server just for you. This is QUALITY hosting.



Server Speed

Finally, without getting too technical, how fast are the servers that those cheap hosting packages are run from? Surfers are impatient creatures, if your site is slow loading because it is hosted on an over crowded, low quality server you will miss out on sales or memberships period!

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