Honest Marketing Secrets

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UPDATE: The honeymoon is over, apparently. Since the new year arrived there have been a few posts by users having some possible big issues with Hostican. [post 1, post 2] I have not had any troubles with 2 of the accounts I’ve worked on, however, a BIG complaint that I have seen has to do with the hyper-sensitivity of their resource monitoring algorithm. If your site has a busy blog, or a busy forum, you may suddenly get a Hostican resource warning page instead of your web site. And I HAVE seen this on one account where a WordPress theme was using a particular image plugin and it was getting the warning page. So that was not good.

We did trace it back to a PHP configuration that was using 100% of memory and when we dialed it back the trouble went away, but the image plugin eventually had to be removed as it needed more memory than Hostican’s servers were going to permit. So there ya go.

While the support was helpful in getting the problem solved, the fact remains that I have never once used up resources with such a small WordPress blog on any of my other servers and this very account never had a single problem on the old server (to be fair, their old server was a VPS (Virtual Private Server) at Liquidweb, but this was one of over 100 accounts on a single VPS and still no problem on the Liquidweb VPS. I have no doubt that a shared hosting account at Liquidweb would also have no trouble with that blog since Liquidweb doesn’t oversell.).

Usually I stay away from any hosting companies that oversell unless they have a proven record for being a good company and my client absolutely, positively cannot afford anything better to get started. I had hoped that Hostican would be a good starter host for beginners and small business web sites and for the most part it probably is, unless you have a highly trafficked blog or forum.

So I am removing my links and recommendations for Hostican and will not recommend them unless they make significant changes to their resource use policy which, I feel, is way too stringent and makes their hosting useful only for small sites with no dynamic content (no blogs, no forums) that receive very little traffic.

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Hello! As you know, I don’t post to my blog too often and that’s because I usually spend a lot of time using the things I tell you about and only pass along the stuff that I really like. Well, guess what? I found something I really like!

I’ve been working with a Web hosting company for the last 5 months and they have surpassed my expectations every time. I’m pretty picky when it comes to the most important thing you MUST have in a good web host. What might that thing be? Glad you asked . . .

It’s customer service, of course. We expect that every web hosting company will have all the bells and whistles that their competitors have, and so the only things separating mediocre (or terrible) hosting companies from great ones is how well and quickly they respond to your request for help, as well as the quality of their educational materials.

I’m happy to say that, of all the companies I’ve dealt with in the past 8 years, this is one of the absolute best.

If you don’t really understand hosting, or know you should put up a web site and don’t know where to go, these folks have a wonderful support site with telephone access to real humans at all hours and great training videos embedded contextually in their control panel (the thing you use to manage your hosting plan).

Altogether they have won me over and I’m thrilled to be able to recommend them. I expect to be hosting many of my sites with them for many years to come.

Review their program even if you don’t think you’ll need it right away. It’s a great site to bookmark for future reference.

Hope your holidays are joyous!
See you in 2008!

In my last post I mentioned the importance of having hosting that never fails you. I also mentioned that even though you may have set yourself up with fantastic hosting, even with one of my recommended hosting companies (Liquid Web for ultimate dedicated and premier shared hosting, and Hostican for lower-priced and huge storage, but still very reliable shared hosting) you still might have your WordPress blog die a sudden death when all those curious Diggers, or Stumblers hit your page because you didn’t know how to prepare for that kind of traffic.

And finally I mentioned a great resource for prepping your blog for massive traffic. There’s nothing that sucks more than finally getting everyone to come see what you’re on about and having the door suddenly slam in their face. Ouch!

Only thing is, that resource I mentioned is pretty technically challenging for all but the more geeky of us and so I was still looking for something a little easier to use.

So imagine how thrilled I was to discover this fantastic plug-in that caches your WordPress blog for you and speeds it up dramatically when heavy traffic comes to call . . . Great! Yes, there may be a little bit of configuring to do, but usually all you have to do is upload and activate.

I’m referring to the marvelous WP Super Cache created by Donncha O Caoimh. If you haven’t installed it yet, what are you waiting for!

Check it out here: http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

All the best,

-Zack

PS- in case you’re wondering, yes indeed, I’m experimenting with a couple different themes right now and working on a custom one. Don’t wig out though when the appearance changes around a bit. This is an experimental blog where I test all these crazy new ideas and software tools and report back to you on it–so expect lots of change! More about that later . . .

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.