Honest Marketing Secrets

Even the “Experts” Have Learned the Hard Way
Believe it or not, many well known internet marketers have made this mistake. And sadly, they made it over and over again until they realized the key lesson that only lost sales can teach. Namely, if it sounds too good to be true . . .

Actually, a bigger secret here is that the true experts learned from their painful mistakes and don’t make the same ones anymore. Of course if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning anything, but that’s a topic for another post.

The Web Hosting Siren Song
It seems so attractive when you see the ad for practically unlimited storage space, unmetered bandwidth and all the email accounts and MySQL databases you can “eat”. And what’s more, every web hosting company seems to be offering these amazing plans for next-to-nothing a month – even the big names! Surely you’ll be able to use all that space and bandwidth since you paid for it, right? Maybe not. In fact, mostly not.

The Dirty Secret
Almost all the companies that are offering huge storage space and unmetered bandwidth have at least one catch, and some have two or three!

Here’s the deal in a nutshell: if you are paying next to nothing, you will most likely NEVER be able to use all your account resources. Many companies hide limitations to your account in the small print when you sign up. For instance, if they give you 10 Gigs of storage, they may limit the number of files you can have on that 10 gigs of disk space and when you go over the file number, even though you might still have plenty of space left in your quota, they’ll suspend your account in the best case and terminate it without warning in the worst case. One key: look for something called an inode limit in your contract. If you see that, you may want to move along and find someone else. Also, be sure and ask up-front if you will be able to use the full amount of the allocated space and bandwidth. The answer may surprise you.

Another way they will surprise you is by putting your account on a server with hundreds of other people’s web sites and if you run a discussion forum, or have a blog that gets a sudden influx of traffic from a social news site like Digg, they’ll suspend, or terminate your account for using too many resources. And even if they don’t suspend or terminate you, your site will probably go down anyway because the server is simply overloaded and they’ve sold you web hosting like an insurance company sells you insurance. They’re banking on the fact that you’ll probably never use 99% of the resources they promised you. (Bear in mind that a badly configured Wordpress installation can go down under massive traffic even if you HAVE lots of resources, so be sure to setup your Wordpress properly also. There’s a link to a Wordpress optimization/caching tutorial for the technically minded at the end of this post.)

Why is Web Hosting Such a Big Deal?
What happens when that amazing new product launch you planned for weeks finally hits the net and the thousands of curious browsers find the dreaded “404 Not Found” error, or the “503 Service Unavailable” error, or the mortifying “Account Suspended” ‘error’? You lose. Big time. Not only do you lose the immediate sale, but far worse, you lose credibility especially with folks who might never have heard about you until that day they found your dead web site. And even those people who might know you and have purchased from you before are going to think twice before recommending you now. It’s truly a dark sales day when your web site goes down. Don’t let it happen. Ever.

So How Do You Find the Good Companies?
I ran my own hosting company for 6 years and that’s how I learned the hard way that most companies are overselling their resources in order to make it in this highly competitive market. For the most part it works because, truly, the majority of people and small businesses on the web have not yet figured out what traffic is, let alone how to coax any of it to their web site. But for you, the savvy internet marketer, this is obviously not the case and makes it a critical part of your business to find and secure the best possible hosting service you can afford.

Here are a few key things to look for in a good web hosting company.
Do they emphasize service and support? That’s a good sign. Do they have a moderate price and offer moderate resources? Also a good sign. If it’s crazy cheap with insane storage and infinite bandwidth, it’s probably too good to be true and you should look elsewhere.

What are people saying about them?
Check out webhostingtalk.com and hostsearch.com for reviews and comments. I have spent months reviewing all manner of hosting companies and these two research sites are great places to pick up tidbits about who’s honest and who’s not quite living up to their promises. Here are the top resources I use for researching hosting companies, although I mostly look to webhostingtalk.com since they don’t allow advertising in most of their forum (they have an area designated for that) and I’ve honestly spent more time there.

webhostingtalk.com
hostsearch.com
webhostdir.com
tophosts.com

The two top web hosting companies I have used and happily recommend over and over again to all my clients are these:

Premier Dedicated and Shared Hosting – Liquid Web
If you need absolutely rock-solid shared hosting with stellar support you will pay about double the bottom-of-the-barrel pricing that most companies are charging, but you won’t ever regret it. (You can also go month-to-month with them right away–they don’t require a 1 year commitment to get their advertised price.) And if it’s dedicated hosting you need, they have one of the best networks and reputations in the industry and I have never once had a problem with my dedicated servers at Liquid Web.
Click here to go with Liquid Web

Outstanding Reputation and Great Support Plus a Competitive Price – HostICan
If you need the lowest price possible without sacrificing resources and support, go with these guys. HostICan has a great reputation on webhostingtalk.com and I have personally spoken with the director of their program and found their claims to be more than matched. Don’t be afraid of the unmetered bandwidth in this case too (which shows that there are no absolutes in this research). You can actually use all your disk space and bandwidth. And they will work with you to keep your site up even if you suddenly find yourself under heavy server resource strain. Note that if you have a heavy resource-using site like a forum with thousands of hourly visitors, I would go for the VPS (minimum) or dedicated solution rather than shared hosting. Also note that you must sign up for a 1 year contract in order to get their lower advertised prices.

I am no longer recommending HostICan–Click to read why.

I am recommending Liquidweb exclusively as they are the only company I have dealt with that has proven to be outstanding in every way.

Thanks and have a powerfully productive day!

Click here to learn how to set up Wordpress to handle a sudden influx of traffic.