Web Hosting Considerations
When selecting a hosting provider it is difficult at best to wade through the promises, guarantees, storage, bandwidth, and features. Many hosting providers make this even more difficult by offering things and making promises they just can’t keep.
Uptimes and Uptime Guarantees
For instance, I am sure you have seen that everyone guarantees somewhere between 99.9% and 100% uptime. That’s fine, but do they actually post their uptimes publicly? We do and our customers can check it any time. That being said, what are they going to do if they cannot meet their promised uptimes or any of the other often worthless guarantees floating around the internet? View our hosting guarantees.
Unlimited Hosting Plans
This has got to be the number one questionable offering floating around the internet. We have been around since the last .com meltdown and the people offering these so-called unlimited plans all vanished then but are somehow back in force currently. We don’t offer unlimited plans because there simply is no such thing. Every provider limits your usage in some way. Check the small print. Usually it is some form of limit imposed by a percentage of server resources (1% to 2%). OK that’s fair. What is not fair is that they don’t actually say what those resources are or how this figure is calculated. Obviously a single Pentium server with an 80 gig hard drive (and there are lots of these around) has different resources than a dual quad core chip server with multiple terabyte drives. Digging deeper, exactly what data transfer do you get a percentage of? Do they have a 10mb/s port or what?
There is no such thing as unlimited storage. Hard drives have limitations in size and if you think that someone is going to keep adding 2 terabyte hard drives to a server for you at $6.95 a month, well, what can we say.
There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth either. The internet is capable of carrying only so much data at any one time, just the same as a water pipe can only supply so many gallons of water an hour. With the increase of media usage on the internet, we have all seen our data transfer plans go from seemingly unlimited to pay per gigabyte over x amount. Check with any major ISP and you will see that this is the way they are all going. Then ask yourself how these hosting providers are giving it away for free. Sorry, but it just doesn’t wash.
At 24-7 Webs we tell you upfront what you get and we guarantee it will be there, period. We don’t permit or want extreme usage users like file sharing or adult sites. We specialize in keeping your site on-line and the resources you pay for available; no tricky marketing; no hidden limitations, no over-loaded servers or network connections.
Dedicated, Unique and Static IP Addresses
Does your provider have IP addresses available? Many don’t and that may be an early indication that the provider in question does not take business hosting seriously. For more information on IP addresses see our IP address article.
24-7 Webs Inc.
Check out our hosting plans. We believe we can give you what need if you are looking for straight forward offerings and a stable operating environment, whether for your business or a personal site. All our plans represent excellent value and provide all the bells and whistles you may ever need. Even our smallest plan is enough for 50 average sized web pages and 5 X 10 mb mail boxes with all the bandwidth 99% of customers require. All our plans come with online site design software included as well.