Guess What’s Going On?
The economy is bad. People are counting their dollars and making tough decisions on what to spend their money on.
At the same time, the face of the web is rapidly changing. Waaayy back when, web hosting was expensive. And you didn’t get much for your buck. I remember the days when domain names were $70 a YEAR! And hosting was $50 or more per month for 100MB of space and maybe 2GB of bandwidth.
Then came the “Happy Days”. The days when companies started coming out with cheaper and cheaper domain names. Web Hosting became cheaper and cheaper too, until you were getting huge amounts of space and bandwidth (yes, some claimed to be “unlimited”, read our post on how THAT works).
In the past couple of years, we’ve started to see the pendulum swing back toward the middle. › Continue reading
The Truth in “Unlimited” From a Hosting Company
Bigger is NOT always better.
Nowadays, hosting companies are going crazy with the amount they claim to offer in their hosting packages. But it’s all smoke and mirrors.
Unlimited Bandwidth
This is the biggie. Everyone wants something that’s unlimited, right? But is it really unlimited?
Bandwidth is the amount of data transferred to and from your website. This includes files (pages and images) downloaded to viewers’ cache’s, FTPed files up and down, and email in and out, as well as a few other things.
An average site won’t use more than 10GB per month. That’s enough for 1,000 visitors per day. A large site with tons of traffic? Maybe 20GB. The sites that really use a ton are sites with large files (downloadable content, for example), or sites that have been hijacked for spam (or legitimate spammers), or sites with hundreds of thousands of visitors every day (like microsoft.com). So the average hosting client does not really NEED unlimited bandwidth. › Continue reading
My Hosting Company Is Down – Or Is It?
If we had a dime for every hosting client who called to complain that “we took their site down”!
Hosting companies take a site down for two reasons.
- You didn’t pay your bill.
Any good hosting company has some type of client area where you can view invoices, see when things are due to renew, manage your account, and most likely put a credit card on file. Make sure your email address is current, and you update any card on file. Invoices will usually be emailed to the address on the account. Check your trash or spam folder if you didn’t get any. - Your site is offensive, or infringes on someone’s copyright.
Hosts don’t want to get involved in any legal proceedings that may arise from accusations of copyright infringement. When someone contacts a host, they most likely will suspend or remove the site pending an investigation. Don’t steal someone else’s work.
Barring the above, the most likely reason your site went offline is because YOUR DOMAIN NAME EXPIRED.
“But I never got any renewal notices!”. Are you SURE? Renewal notices will go to the admin email contact on the domain name whois. Many people claim they never got the notices, only to find that the email address is “WAY old, Man, I haven’t used that one in years!” Make sure you keep your domain name whois information up to date at all times. Once the domain expires and goes offline, even once you renew it, it can take up to two days to come back online (propagate).
