Website Hosting Blues?
Is your website hosting provider not living up to expectations?
Just as with some leaders, the leading website hosting services may also suffer from the odd occasion where a customer can easily feel dissatisfied and begin to lose trust…or even hope!
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If you have anything to do with launching websites or blogs for the ‘live’ Internet, then you’ll be familiar with trying to choose a suitable website hosting service. You are probably also aware of the website “host-bashing” that takes place online amongst social media and other internet communities and forums.
Which, if you read between the lines, knowingly, it would seem that many convictions are slightly skewed. Especially when you haven’t suffered any of the problems other dissatisfied customers are expressing. This is normally true up until the point that you have a problem yourself.
Now, this does make me wonder, just how genuine many of these comments really are. And when I say genuine, I mean in a way that is connected to the fact that the issues a number of people have with website hosting, originate from something external to the actual hosting service itself.
Whilst this highlights just how complex the whole affair of website hosting can be. There is always one expectation that every website hosting customer assumes. And that is access to support from a real person, whether in the form of a live chat, or by phone. By phone being the last resort.
Now, it has to be said. And with no holding back; but finding a straight forward, clear-as-day website hosting service really sucks. Almost every one of them, not all, but most of them (I haven’t tried them all), are riddled with convoluted promises and the same old “gotcha” plans.
Hey, it’s a convoluted game…
So bad is the situation that it makes it very difficult to recommend to clients or even friends what can be called a “Reliable and Affordable” website host.
Well, if we are talking about using WordPress or similar platforms, then the cause of a problem can be numerous. However, for most part, things tend to run smoothly with WordPress, and problems can often be quickly remedied in some way or another. There is just so much online support…
Overall, with regards to actual hosting problems, it can be difficult to tell where a website hosting problems may stem from. Although, having a lack of trust in a website host, is another factor that may help contribute to bad feelings towards a specific website hosting service.
However, the topics people appear to be most actively vocal with, is where downtime and security is an issue. Especially from busy e-commerce store owners, where having a constantly secure customer access is essential for making sales.
How do you settle for the best website hosting service when most of them offer basically the same thing?
As with most things we settle for the better of the worse. And no, I didn’t say settle for the worse. That would be insane… or would it?
What you should do, is consider just how bad your current website hosting service provider really is:
Look at it this way as an example of how things may not work out for you, even with a reputable hosting service.
Okay, so here is my example; you know how website hosting services always promote easy migration. Well, my most recent experience with Siteground was awful.
Which may have been unfortunate for me, but to be fair, the WordPress website l attempted to migrate, did have a fairly huge database, which in fact exceeded the 50Mb limit allowed for importing an sql file.
This, I found out later, after going the manual migration route. And so the process wasn’t simple for me, but it may be for you. Next…
• Is you website constantly down? (use down for everyone or just me?)
• Is your current plan suitable for what you want? (Faster web hosting)
• Do you find the whole process of handing-over completed websites to clients a tedious drag? (solution for agencies, designers and developers)
– The monthly vs yearly cost
– The number of websites permitted
– The size of the disc space allowed
And then the extras, such as…
– 1 year Free domain
– Free SSL
– CDN availability
– Other…
In spite of my experience, Siteground is by no means a website hosting service to be scoffed at, and so therefore in my opinion, it would be fair to feel the same way about one of Siteground’s main competitors Bluehost.
Just as with all presidents, website hosting suffers from the odd occasion where a customer can easily feel dissatisfied and lack trust. Especially where where issues are raised frequently and not dealt with professionally or in a way expected. In such cases a customer can easily feel dissatisfied with the service they are, or not getting. Additionally, with some hosting services there can be an air of “shady-ness” that develops, which is when trust starts to diminish more rapidly.
Which leads me on to say, where it comes to internet services like web hosting, customer support is of great importance. And having genuine and quality staff is equally as important.
However, not being able to contact support in the first place is pretty bad. And contacting Siteground wasn’t simple (at first), as the only way I could find access to any support, was through first logging in. Which I couldn’t do because of there now being a problem with my account. (something to do with new customers having to go here)
Well, it looks like I may be trying Siteground again, soon. But this time, starting from scratch, rather than migrating a whole website in one go.
What a shame, that my second experience with Siteground concluded with me not having any success at experiencing the apparent easy migration afforded through using their AutoMigrator WordPress plugin option.
This would have been perfect, had it worked for me. Then I could have maybe tell you something good about the migration process with Siteground.
Of course, I could have just paid the $30 fee for allowing the hosting company to do the migration for me. But then that would be cheating.
All the same, I have provided you with a heads-up on one of the problems you too may have had to face, if you are intending on migrating a website. I also hope that this might inspire you to think more openly about the nature of the website hosting industry.
If the comments field is available, please feel free to leave your thoughts and experiences with website hosting services below:
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