Hosting Companies

So, I need to rant a little bit… Being in the hosting biz , I occasionally get inquiries on why we charge almost twice as much as our competitors at $9.99/month. I also get asked why we have limits on disk space and bandwidth when other well know hosting companies provide UNLIMITED disk space, bandwidth and a whole host of other features with no constraints.

Here’s the fine print of the Terms & Conditions from one of these popular magical hosting companies offering unlimited everything on their site:

We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to discontinue service to any customer with a website or other hosted data that takes up more than 10% of the server resources and/or 10% of the server’s CPU. This means that if your website is found to be utilizing more than 10% of the CPU and memory of the service, we reserve the right to take your site offline.

In my opinion, this is fraud in its exact definition: A deception deliberately practiced in order to secure unfair or unlawful gain. So why advertise Unlimited?  Oh, that’s right… to deliberately deceive your customers. This same company even has inode restrictions. Does a regular customer even know what an inode is? Of course not. Wow, I won’t even touch this one. Make sure you read the fine print before purchasing so you know what you’re really getting. Oh yea, magical unicorns and fairies don’t exist either. 😉

[Insert plug here 🙂 ] My company owns our servers and hosts them in a Class A data center within a 15 minute drive from our office.  Do we guarantee 100% uptime? no.  Do we offer unlimited diskspace, bandwidth, resources? no.   Why?  because we haven’t been able to defy the laws of physics and more importantly, we acutally enjoy the close relationships we develop with our customers and the service we provide them. We’re (zagweb.com) also developer friendly and will install any packages that you might need for your development as long as it doesn’t interfere with other clients if you’re on a shared environment.

Happy Hosting Hunting!