Very so often I come across complaints and accusations directed towards web hosting providers on their hosting plans that are deceving their customers. How true it is that the provider is trying to be dishonest with its clients? I presume most famous or renowned providers won’t do such a trick. After all, providers need the support of customers in order to survive, why would they dig their own graves? Maybe there is misunderstanding that exists in between the clients and providers until clients feel as if they have been cheated in the first place. Therefore, I see a need in writing this simple and straight to the point article on how to really choose a suitable web hosting plan so that no disappoinment or anger exists in the future.
Types of hosting plans:
Shared Hosting
As implied by the word “shared”, this type of hosting plan is shared by a lot of hosting accounts in the same server. Usually, it’s around 200 domains in one server ( as in Exabytes’ case). Problems will arise when one or two black sheeps in the server causes CPU overloading (for customers, you can actually help to reduce CPU overloading. Kindly refer “The gists of being a happy and satisfied customer” in the paragraphs below). First headache, when hosting provider suspends the black sheep’s hosting account, they will protest and got angry and then started posting bad review in forums on the respective hosting provider. Second headache, if the hosting provider does not suspend the account that causes CPU system hog, other 199 customers sharing the same server will be angry at hosting provider as well and start to post bad reviews in forums that the hosting providers’ speed is slow, regret choosing the provider and so on. Now, it won’t look good for the provider, of course, as they need to make a wise decision, either to tackle “headache #1″ or ” headache # 2″.
Hence, whatever decision by the providers will in one way or another offends the customers. Therefore, please take note that shared hosting is meant for website with low traffic, uses less than 1000 emails daily, and will be great if it’s for personal, family, small business purposes such as, personal websites, informative blogs, company website or photo gallery.
Semi-Dedicated Server Hosting
This type of hosting plan is almost the same as shared hosting. In fact, having the same concept as shared hosting but 1 level higher than shared hosting. Only key difference is that in one server, we have made it clear that we will host MAX 5 accounts. It’s meant to conquer the problems faced by website owners in shared hosting environment. With less accounts in one server, definitely, there will be less problems. It’s advisable that website owners especially those who are keen to involve in community portal, forums or medium-sized enterprise to opt for this semi-dedicated server plan. Take a simple analogy here, living in a terrace house is definitely better than living in a flat. Less noise, less congestion. Shared hosting is like a flat and semi-dedicated server is just like a terrace house. Think of it, you need to use lift and wait for your lift everyday.. but with terrace house, just open your main door, you are already out in the car porch.
Virtual Private Server Hosting
Popularly known as VPS, this is a hosting plan considered as 1 step below a dedicated server. It’s often used as a test server, or for those who wish to own a dedicated server but could not afford to. It has root access which you cannot find in the above-mentioned semi-dedicated server plan. All in all, it’s a great plan for those software developers or small webhosts.
Dedicated Server Hosting
Needs no introduction to this “powerhouse” in web hosting world! Dedicated server is ideal for corporate usage, government, huge community and also web hosting provider like us, Exabytes. Those who are interested in media streaming, corporate portal, high traffic forums need to take serious note in finding more about dedicated server.
The gists of being a happy and satisfied customer:
This paragraph is specially dedicated to the customers on the roles they could play in order to ease themselves in the future. I’m sure they are customers who might think that such roles are to be played by the providers and not them since they have paid the money, of course they deserve to be served well. No doubt customers deserve to be treated extremely well, even better than a king, but sometimes, hosting providers will have to act sternly (and resulting anger from the affected customers) on some of the uncooperative customers to protect the welfare of other customers who happen to be in the “same neighbourhood”. Ain’t easy to be stucked in the middle of such a situation. Any steps taken will definitely cause dissatisfaction among the affected clients (as aforementioned in the paragraph on “shared hosting”). So, it will be of best or a Win-Win situation if customers can just weigh the pros and cons of the suitable hosting plans they need before purchasing. I’m sure the customer service of any hosting providers will be able to give you an aid on the suitable types of hosting plan that can cater your online storefronts’ needs. And for forums or community portal developers, there are just a few side notes I’d like to add here:
1) Avoid using CMS or forums software that will cause high CPU resources. This is because most CMS softwares causes resources hog when building pages or retrieving images from databases. Those queries that are being run might cause CPU overloading in the server and causes frustration particularly to those in shared hosting plan as Max CPU consumption allocated to shared hosting account tend to be lesser. Try searching on the Internet for a more suitable CMS software to reduce such problem.
2) Take note on your code efficiency as well. It’s also known that besides queries, those not well-optimized codings will exhaust the server CPU processing power and memory in seconds.
3) Pay attention to the forum members’ post and the usage of signatures’ size, avatars’ size and preferably no animations and no overused plug-ins.
As a conclusion, hope this article can add extra knowledge to you and create a better hosting environment for everyone!