5 ways your web host could be ripping you off - Without you even knowing it.

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Has your web site been a little…slow?

Let me tell you - A bad web host can bleed you dry - charging you outrageous fees and driving your customers away.

Here’s how they do it:

Overages

So you thought you were saving some sweet moolah buying that cheap hosting plan. Think again. Lots of hosts rake in extra cash by charging you ridiculous overages for bandwidth and disk space. How to tell that you’re being bilked? Look at the numbers: over a dollar a gigabyte for either, and you’re walking on the razor’s edge.

Third class on the titanic

Shared hosting providers are notorious for packing hundreds or thousands of sites onto a single box. They want to save money on hardware, but it could be slowing your website to a crawl.

Here’s a tip - if you have shell access and your server runs some flavor of unix, try the “uptime” command. It will give you the server load for the past 1, 5 and 15 minutes. If those numbers are always near 1, RUN!

$ uptime
.... load averages: 0.21, 0.24, 0.23

Piss Poor security.

What would happen to your pagerank if spammers got control of your website? How long would it take you to recover? Sound far fetched? Hackers recently stole 3,500 FTP passwords from the uber-popular DreamHost. They were stored in an unencrypted text file! (And yes, that included one of MY passwords.)

Legacy Plans

Have you had your host since the 90s? Then there’s a good chance you’re paying too much for too little. If you’re disk quotas are in the tens of megabytes, if PHP is considered a “premium feature”, then I’ve got an old brick cellphone and a VHS copy of the Matrix that I’ll give you a real good deal on.

Lights Out

Lets face it, outages happen. But for some hosts they happen again….and again. Sound Familiar? Services like the free mon.itor.us will ping your site on a regular basis and let you know of any down time. Whew! Now you can give that sleep-deprived intern a break.

So you’re being taken to the cleaners. Time to switch hosts? The blogging tips site, Essential Keystrokes, has a some good advice:

Learn how to change hosts

More on Switching Hosts