We have all see these deals from time to time "Lifetime Web Hosting!
Pay one price for the lifetime of your account!" On the surface the
deal seems to be good. But is it? There are several questions you
should ask yourself before you consider such a deal, because you may
not get your money's worth out of it, and you may experience some
other unfortunate consequences. So how do you know if lifetime web
hosting is right for you?
1. How long will you have your web
hosting account?
The first question to ask yourself is how long
will you have a hosting account for the particular site you are
building? The way most lifetime hosting offers work is they
determine how long (in months) an average customer stays with their
company and multiply that number by their monthly selling price for
a web hosting account. They will then use that number to
determine how much to charge as a one time hosting fee.
If
you are only planning to have your account for 1 year or less, it
probably isn't worth it to purchase a lifetime web hosting account,
as you will be charged a premium for your hosting account.
If
you plan on keeping your account for more than 2 or 3 years, it may
be worth the price, but you will have to answer the following
questions to see if a lifetime hosting account is really for you.
2. Is your web site going to require a lot of resources?
If you
plan on having a web site that has a high amount of traffic, or will
actively use a database, you may want to re-think your purchase.
Companies that sell lifetime hosting accounts make money from you
once, but their expenses happen every month. As a result, they
have to continue to sell lifetime web hosting accounts in order to
make enough income to pay their expenses, which gives them a strong
motive to minimize.
One of the expenses, is server space and
capacity. The more servers a web hosting company has, the more their
monthly expenses are. One way to reduce their expenses, is to put
more hosting accounts on a server than it can reasonably handle with
the expectation that most websites will not use the full capacity of
their account. Many times, these servers are oversold on space
and bandwidth (think of an airline selling more tickets than they
have seats for a specific flight).
The result is that sites
on these servers tend to be slower than average, and if you have a
site that has a lot of traffic, many of your visitors may have
trouble getting to your site, and will leave before your web page
shows up in their browser.
If this situation isn't important
to you, the next question is certainly one you should be asking
yourself.
3. What is the refund policy of the hosting
company?
Since many of the servers in these lifetime hosting
companies are overloaded, they usually take a zero tolerance policy
on any web site that causes any extra load on the server, which may
cause it to crash, and it can be a one strike and your out, with no
refund.
On over-extended servers, (servers with more hosting
accounts on them than they have capacity for), it is very easy to
create an overload on the server. It can be as simple as
having a lot of page views from the traffic the website gets, or
having your blog attacked by a bunch of robot scripts trying to post
comment spam to your blog.
There is nothing you can do about it
in these cases, but it can cause a server that is already at it's
limit, to crash.
If this happens after only 6 months into
your web hosting contract, you may be totally out of luck and have
your site shut down with no refund. In this case, it would
have been a very expensive hosting service. Be sure to check the
terms of service before purchasing this type of hosting.
4.
Do you expect a high level of customer service?
The quality of the customer service goes along with the theme of
reducing expenses. One of the first places most customers experience
in expense cutting is the level of customer service. Much of the
time, customer service is outsourced and overseas. There may be
language barriers to contend with as well as some delays in getting
your questions answered, and problems resolved. Sometimes you may
have to deal with less experienced hosting administrators, but by no
means do you find the less experienced customer service
representatives only in the lifetime web hosting arena.
This
is an important factor to consider because if the customer service
is really bad, you may be forced to leave the hosting company and
walk away from your entire hosting investment. Be sure to get as
much information as you can about the particular company you are
considering, especially their level of customer service and their
technical competency.
When asking the question, "Is lifetime
web hosting right for me?" you want to determine what kind of site
you plan on having, and how you plan to use it (will there be heavy
traffic or not?), how long you plan on having your web site up, and
some other factors such as how important are things such as customer
service to you. In a limited number of circumstances, lifetime
web hosting can be a deal as it is better than free hosting, but if
you step outside of the limited situations, you may end up paying a
lot more than you bargained for.
Look for resource sites to
help you with deciding how to pick your web hosting.
