Web hosting horror stories are very common, mainly because poor choices made when looking for a reliable web host will only show signs of the problem once the user has already settled in with his or her own website and has already wasted several months’ worth in hosting fees. Here are a few examples of these web hosting horror stories, straight from people who eventually dropped their web hosts and moved to Prestige Technologies. Note that we’re not mentioning any individual names or companies as the point is not to put down competitors. Instead, we are shining the spotlight on the problems that you could encounter if you don’t do your homework when choosing a web host:

Website Is Down For Two Days Due to a Blizzard

One of our clients used to have an account with a web hosting provider that offered extremely cheap rates on unlimited bandwidth and storage plans. However, it would seem that there is a catch, and the user was only made aware of it when a blizzard hit a city that had the provider’s datacentre. His website went down immediately and stayed down for two whole days, mainly because all of the web host’s servers are located in a single place and there are no redundancies in place to account for disasters. In an era where two hours of downtime is already disastrous, two whole days of downtime could translate to loss of traffic and in the case of large businesses – thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

Prestige Technologies is a solid hosting company that guarantees consistent quality service. Click here and check out the different plans.

Reseller Runs Away With Their Money

Another of our clients is hosting a relatively small forum full of people that he’s known for over a decade, with the forum serving as their primary means of communication after drifting apart in real life (taken by careers and family responsibilities to different corners of the world.) The server that the forum was hosted on was bought from a reseller. The service was performing well initially, the loading speeds were consistent and they had very little downtimes. There was no need to contact support and the user was content with just getting charged on his credit card on a monthly basis. However, after 3 years the forum just straight up and died.

The files were gone and the domain name, which was bought separately, is now redirecting to a parking page. It turns out that the reseller went out of business (or just straight up ran away with the hosting fees) and left its customers at the mercy of the original web host. The web host let the orphaned accounts run for a while before suddenly “cleaning up” and taking down all accounts that weren’t bought from them. This left the messageboard users with no place to go to. They have since rebuilt the message board, but thousands of threads full of meaningful conversation was lost in the purge.

Smaller Web Host is Cannibalized By a Larger Competitor

Another of our clients went with a small web hosting company because they felt that their needs don’t really require the kind of service that bigger hosting companies provide in exchange for a little bit more in hosting costs. They were a small outfit and don’t really see monthly traffic that would reach 5 digits. However, the small web host was soon bought by a much larger competitor and instead of a smooth merger, its services were left to wither with slow speeds, frequent downtimes, and customer support that was virtually unavailable. The client suspects that it is a way to make the larger company’s offerings that much better by way of comparison, and to indirectly encourage its existing userbase into moving to their own services after months of disappointing service. It may seem petty and unethical, but it happens in many industries.

The Thousand Dollar Excess Bandwidth Charge

Lastly, one client had a fairly good experience with his web host. Servers were fast, the rates were decent, and the features had everything he need. But a change in Google brought his traffic down by half – it was the Google Image Search that resulted in virtually half of his traffic no longer reaching the main site (basically, Google used to bring up the site when a user clicks on the image, but now Google just caches the images so that people won’t even need to load the site that the image came from.) In order to regain his traffic, the client installed a wordpress plugin that redirected GIS results to his homepage instead of just the image. It would have been fine except the plugin had a bug resulting in page access multiplying per session. The site felt like it was DdoSed.

Fortunately for the client, his web host’s servers were robust and the site didn’t go down. Unfortunately, the web host didn’t contact him about the abnormal spikes in traffic and let it continue until he racked up a thousand dollars in excess bandwidth charges. The client had no choice but to pay up, but he left the web host upon settling his balance.

Lessons From the Horror Stories

As mentioned above, these horror stories are not meant to put down other web hosts but rather to point out a few things that users need to look for when choosing a web host. Here are Prestige Technologies, we can avoid the above scenarios because we don’t sacrifice the quality of our services just to provide cheap rates, we’re not so small that we’d be gobbled by a larger company, and our staff and customer support representatives are all attuned to the needs and experiences of our customers, ensuring that you will be notified immediately if there is a potential problem from either of our ends.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2014 at 10:00 am and is filed under Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.