Why should I question the quality of my web host?

I have written countless articles about how young kids open hosting companies and how most offers online are in fact resellers and not the actual website hosting company. I have warned people over and over not to deal with a host that you can't call because they don't have a phone number.

But I really need to make one big point. You should not listen to me, just do a google search for hosting forums or hosting reseller forums.

What you will find is exactly what I have preached about, inexperienced young adults most under 18 talking about starting hosting companies for $25 or less. Or how to manage a hosting company by clicking on cpannel icons from their browser. Rarely will you hear anyone that actually owns their own servers or understands system administration.

Most of the people you will find have less than 10 clients or are looking for a way to start a hosting business for as little as possible.

That should be very disturbing to you.

For one, how can you expect the host to be prepared for unexpected expenses like bandwidth overages when they only have $25 to $50 to invest to get started? What if a customer does not pay them, where will they get the money to pay their bill?

Two, how good of a service can anyone provide when they can't afford any more than a basic website that they intend to split up between as many clients as they can possibly signup?

And three, how can they promise you any type of service when they are not the actual people providing it?

You should be very skeptical of any hosting company. If they don't own and run their own equipment, then they are subject to terms and conditions f their provider that you are completely unaware of.

If you call your host, what do they do to fix your problem? Not much since they only have a $25 a month account. Nobody is going to drop everything to correct their problem which is now your problem.

Even more disturbing is the complete lack of knowledge that these newbies have about hosting in general. So how can you expect performance when they don't even understand what that means. If they did, they would not be asking about it in reseller forums.

Since the industry is UNLICENSED and there is no standard to meet to qualify as a web host, anyone with a website can claim to be a website hosting company. That conversely means that your hosting company could be anyone, even the kids you see getting of the school bus each afternoon.

We don't have anything against young people having businesses or selling website hosting. But lets face it, I would not want to let a 15 year old do a liver transplant on me. I would really like to have someone with a little more experience.

That is because my life depends on it. And more so when my business depends on my website do I need a host with real credentials, real equipment and a real ability to address problems.

Lets say you have an issue because your webmaster installed a program that uses too many system resources and your site gets closed down by the people managing the server. When you do find out and it could have been days after the site was closed by the actual hosting company. Now you will have to email your reseller. They can in turn email their host and ask what the problem is. Then when they get a response they will write a new email and tell you what the problem is. Then you write them back an email asking what to do about it....... and so on and so on.

If you just bought the space from the people that run the server, you could pick up the phone and have your site back up in a matter of minutes. The worst part is, the actual provider is charging less than you are paying, that is how the reseller makes money.

Why would you want a middle man that could potentially slow down the support process by days and cause your site to be offline for extended periods.

I will give you this. In some cases, people lease dedicated servers and have full root access to manage the servers even though they don't actually own them or have direct datacenter access. In those cases, you are much better off, but if a hard drive fails or a CPU overheats, you are still dependant on that middleman to work with the actual server owner to resolve the problem or replace the hardware. So where is your confidence level when you don't actually know who is operating the server.

Here is something that most people don't expect. Pictured below is a screen capture of a hosting company's website. Looks great right? Must be legit and reliable with a nice website like that.

How can you go wrong?

This is a screencap of a downloadable TEMPLATE! Anyone with $15 in a paypal account can download hundreds of website hosting templates and upload one to their website. Instant hosting company!

Well, lets take a look at the datacenter that this company runs. Below is a photo from an actual hosting company. Believe it or not this was posting in a forum showing how they were "racking" their servers. I guess they were proud of the fact that they had several dedicated servers all running websites. While I don't think any professional company hosting a website with them would be as impressed with their equipment.

How would you feel if your website was hosted in this datacenter? This photo was actually posted in a forum with the owner bragging about the quality of their hosting service.

The big issue is you just don't know unless you do some research.

I have found hosting companies running from home based T-1 lines that were extremely reliable, professional and knowledgeable. I have also found hosting companies with datacenter space on T-3 backbones, hosting thousands of website with technicians that did not have a clue. In my early years many of those technicians cost me tens of thousands of dollars in fees because of their lack of ability. Often charging me 20+ hours labor for what should be a 1 hour job.

Maybe I can eat the cost for the repair, but I can't have my website down for 3 days while they do the work. I need the technician that can fix the problem in one hour and get my website back online.

I want to know that when a website is down, my host know why and that they are working on fixing it before I know it's down.

After all, isn't that why you pay for website hosting? To let a professional do the worrying for you. To have a company that can manage all problems and let you worry about running your business and not checking your website to make sure it's running.

I don't want to discourage anyone from taking a chance on a young adult or a small company, after all, we are a small company, but I expect you to do some research. Ask questions, express concerns, if the host is offended by the list of questions, then they don't understand how important your website is to your business. In that case they wont be responsive when you have real problems.

In some cases where the reseller is writing code or managing a web application, the solution may work best for you. Every instance has different circumstances, just know what position you are in before its lights out on your website because of what someone else is doing.