Is Your Blog Hosting Company Scamming You?

Finding the right website hosting service can be a hassle, especially if you’re not sure about the kind of specifics you need.

There are hosting companies that will offer you the moon for as low as $3.99 per month, and there are also hosting companies that will offer you the minimum for hundreds of dollars every month.

You want to find some middle ground.  Find a hosting company that gives you more for less, but offers a reasonable package, not some hocus pocus garbage that could never be true.

Here’s how to tell if your hosting company of choice is scamming you.

Unlimited Space & Unlimited Bandwidth

You’ve seen them.  Hosting companies that offer unlimited bandwidth for as little as 6.95 per month.  But have you ever really stopped to think what this means?

What’s the largest hard-drive you’ve ever seen?  I see 500gb hard-drives at office depot every time I go in.  Now imagine how many hard drives someone would need to really give you unlimited disk space.

Let’s say your hosting company only gives you 500GB of storage space on a shared server.  Now you’re sharing this server with 300 other poeple who get the same amount of storage space.

This means that server would need a hard-drive that could hold 150,000GB of data.  There aren’t hard-drives that offer even 1% of that amount of disk space.  Sure they could string hard-drives together to create all that disk space, but then they’d be losing money, and hosting companies aren’t in the business of losing money.

The same is also true for the unlimited bandwidth these hosting companies offer.  They give you crazy numbers that don’t add up if you really sit down and think logically about it.

How The Con Works

When you sign-up with a hosting company that offers these outrageous claims, take a look at their terms of service.  You’ll notice a section that limits your use of the amount of bandwidth and disk space you can use of the total amount they give you.

It’s much like placing a horse in a 20 acre field and only letting him run around on 5 acres of it.  And when he tries to use more than that 5 acres, you shoot him.

When I first started blogging, I signed up with one of these companies, having not done my research.  When my blog traffic increased from nothing to over 4,000 visits per month within the first month, the hosting company shut my site down and told me I had reached my limit on bandwidth.

After reading their terms of service, I realized they only allowed me to use 10% of the server’s processor for my blog, and everyone else got 10% of that as well.  I got scammed, and I had to learn it the hard way.  My blog was down for 2 weeks before I finally got moved over to a better hosting company.

What Do I Recommend?

I recommend spending some time looking at different hosting companies that offer reasonable bandwidth and disk space limits.  Nothing too over-the-top, or you’re looking at getting scammed.

Try to talk to someone at each company and work out a special discount for using them.  Most hosting companies who are worth their weight will work with you.  If they won’t, and they’re hard to get in contact with, go somewhere else.

You don’t have to do what your hosting company says you have to do.  It’s your blog, it’s your business, you should do what you want with it.

If you’re looking for a specific recommendation for a great hosting company, I use Bluefur hosting.  John Chow uses them as well, and the best part is you can talk to the owner at anytime on Twitter.  If you want to give them a try, you can get 10% off any hosting package with the code: steven-sanders.

Don’t fall for the scams of these other hosting companies that refer you to another country for customer support, leaving you unnsatisfied and wondering how you’re possibly going to understand what they are saying to you.

Who do you use for your hosting needs?  Are they scamming you?  How easy are they to contact when you need help?