The downside of cheapo hosting services
Most hosting services boast all kinds of stuff ranging from oodles of webspace, perhaps unlimited bandwidth and, of course, excellent support.
If you want to you can check out most of these easily enough. Sufficient patience or a very high speed Internet connection will let you fill up all that webspace and if you load enough videos you could even check out the bandwidth fairly easily.
What’s less easy to check out is the customer service. Most of the time it’s something that you really don’t need as most facilities on a hosting system are fully automated these days. When you do need it is when something goes wrong and that’s where the cheapo hosts can really let you down bigtime.
Try searching for “3ix hacked” for instance. You’ll find site after site that’s had problems thanks to their rather lax backup policies and apparently poor security which let the servers be hacked in the first place (note that the majority of those sites are talking about a hack of the 3ix hosting service rather than individual sites).
OK, so you should be doing your own backups but that’s something that many people expect (with good reason) their hosting service to do. In some cases it appears that 3ix only do a once a month backup which isn’t really adequate but then as 3ix only charge $1/month you’re obviously not going to get a top of the line service and it would appear that backups are one area where they save money.
So is the answer to go for a more expensive hosting service? That’ll help in some ways but you should note that most hosting services have something buried in their Terms of Service to the effect that it’s your responsibility to take backups. The only foolproof way seems to be to do your own backups which isn’t the pain that you may think as they can be scheduled to take place when you’re not using the computer.
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Copyright © 2008 by Arnold Stewart. All rights reserved.