What is the REAL cost of website hosting?
Wow, you cannot believe your luck when you find this great deal for website hosting only $3.95 per month, you add on daily backups for only $19.95 because we all know how important it is to have everything backed up. Upon switching to your “too good to be true” hosting company you have a simple question, after thirty minutes on hold you finally reach a customer service agent. You spend an additional thirty minutes explaining how your website was fine last week but now the website is returning 404 codes, page not found error. Page not found, where could your pages have gone? You have not made any changes. Perhaps the agent does not understand you because of your thick American accent, which is understandable right, so you speak very slowly. The customer service agent tells you to email EVERYTHING you just said to their support team. Now, you spend twenty-five minutes describing everything AGAIN in detail with dates, account numbers, domain names and error codes in an email to the hosting companies technical support team. You get a receipt from the hosting company acknowledging your support request and informing that for you can pay for expedited support, which turns out to be $150.00 an hour. An email arrives from Phil at technical support at 3:30 the following morning asking you to please recreate the issue and send them a screen shot in jpg format.
Your website has been down now for at least three days when you receive an email responding to your screen shot asking you to describe your problem; apparently, it is not standard practice to document all telephone and email interactions. This time you are to describe each step you took to recreate the problem in detail. Oh, and do not forget to include dates, account numbers domain names and error codes with your response. Each email signed “Kindest Regards,” but at this point, you are not feeling any kindness. A prompt response arrives, only fifteen hours later, telling you to reinstall your content management system. You reinstall your open source content management system and after several hours of trial and error the website is finally up and running but the content is missing. One more time you start the process of contacting your hosting company and their response, sorry they do not offer technical support for the content management system that you installed through their control panel.
For those of you that are not familiar with “open source,” it is a program designed and distributed free of charge but once you install the application you are on your own. Some open source applications have been extensively tested and have excellent knowledge databases to help troubleshoot technical issues others provide forums that you can submit questions to other users, not such a good resource when you are way over your head. Now one may ask why you did not simply have the hosting company restore the site from those wonderful daily backups. Turns out when they say daily backup, they mean that they will backup your website every working day, not exactly every day but what they consider daily, and each time overwrite the previous backup. Geniuses, you would not want those redundant backups lingering around taking up space on your unlimited hosting account.
Remember, your website has been down for three days and just so happens that they have a backup from the day after you first contacted technical support. Finally, in order to get your website repaired you call a professional website repair company. Come to find out, the website repair company offers monthly packages that include free hosting, redundant backups, monthly audits and updates.
Hosting $3.95, useless backups $19.95, a functional well-managed website priceless!
