Most people think of hosting as some necessity for running a website that costs $0.99 a month, or at most a few bucks.
Would you believe me if I told you a rouge hosting company cost me thousands of dollars due to a loss of potential income?
That’s right, something as simple as a hosting account for your website can be the difference between a highly profitable month and utter financial disaster. Here’s what happened to me and how you can avoid it.
How It Went Down
A few months ago I was using a dedicated server to host a bunch of my domains and email accounts. (I’m not going to name the company because the point of this post is not to attack them, just to offer some advice to my readers). I wasn’t doing anything too intensive, in fact I had purchased ~28 IP’s so that all of my domains would be hosted through a unique IP.
- Since I had tons of room on my server (which costed me over $120 per month) I decided to share it with one of my internet marketing buddies that I knew could benefit from the extra server for his emailing.
- My buddy does direct emailing (100% can-spamm compliant <– that’s the official spam laws set by the government), and makes a full-time living from it. Basically he does affiliate marketing and CPA (cost per action, an example would be those landing pages that offer you a free iPhone if you complete a survey).
- He does recieve a fair amount of spam complaints from people clicking the spam button on their email accounts rather than just unsubscribing from his newsletter/mailing list.
- Anyway, my hosting provider doesn’t love the fact that a bunch of people classified email going through the dedicated server as spam, so they started harassing me each and every day.
Fast forward to a month or two into my use of the server, I start getting threatening emails from my hosting company. “You received a spam complaint and have to respond to it in under 24 hours or we will suspend your account.”
Every single time I would spend 20-30 minutes filling out a form, sending them an email through their customer service application, just to have it OK’d by their team.
It got to the point where I was spending more time filling out spam reports for my buddy than I was on my own websites.
Then It Got Worse… So Much Worse
After just two months of service my server was suspended, which means they basically shut it off, randomly one day because I didn’t respond to one of their emails quick enough. (I was in St. Martin at the time on a family vacation, and didn’t have internet/my laptop with me).
That was the final straw… I decided that I had enough with the bad service from this fairly well-known hosting company. I was now losing money because all of my websites went offline, my buddy couldn’t email, and I had to now go find, test, and set-up a new dedicated server.
So what would you have done in this circumstance?
I chose to cancel my account. I decided to cut my losses and just move on.
After going through their canceling process I got an email maybe two days later saying that I couldn’t close my account because they issued a $200 fee for closing my account early. Yup… hidden charges.
On top of that, another hidden charge that was in their “fine print” was that if I didn’t cancel my account BEFORE 3 days prior to the end of my last month, I would be charged for another month.
It was basically a catch-22, I couldn’t cancel my account because they wanted me to pay a ridiculous fee, and I would be charged another $100+ for now canceling quick enough.
You might think they only cost me $500 in those crazy fees… but you need to take into account the time lost, potential earnings from my websites being offline for a week, and then the overall amount they cost me was well into the thousands. :(
Suffice To Say I Don’t Use Them Anymore For Hosting
I paid their crazy fees and moved on. Then I spent another 2 months looking for the best web hosting providers, and that’s my gift to you today.
The Most Reputable Hosting Companies (In my experience)
(Disclosure: The links below are affiliate links that will earn me a commission if you purchase through them. If you do, I incredibly appreciate it and if you have any questions about these services feel free to contact me. I will never compromise the integrity of my reviews/recommendations for a commission.)
Hostgator – These guys are cheap and effective. They are perfect for small websites that are trying to minimize their costs. I recommend using a shared hosting plan from them for the first months or years that your website is still in the “early” or “launch” phase. They also have dedicated servers, VPS, etc.
WPEngine - These guys are the big leagues of hosting. I’m pretty sure they only offer hosting for wordpress sites… but they do that better than anyone in the industry. Their shared hosting is better than 99% of the competing companies. The downside is that these guys are expensive (for a small website that’s not bringing in revenue).
So honestly I would stick to these guys for any type of hosting. The one choice you have to make is whether or not you need high-end hosting. For 90% of the online world, Hostgator will provide more than enough bandwidth, speed, and overall efficiency.
If you are planning on starting a professional website based on WordPress, or a blog that has hundreds of posts, then you would probably need the added power, security and stability that WPEngine provides.
There’s no obligation to purchase from those companies, they are just the ones I personally love, but I do require one thing: promise me you won’t use any shady hosting companies.
So now its your turn: have you had any incredibly terrible/amazing experiences with web hosting companies?
Young entrepreneur. Money generating machine. Procrastinator. Self-proclaimed genius. (Just kidding). Follow as I fight for a slice of the online revenue pie. Maybe you'll even learn a thing or two. 
So I use Bluehost, which seems fine. Any thoughts about them? They had some outage issues for my site months ago, but that seems resolved now.
At what point traffic-wise should you consider dedicated hosting?
Also, “money generating machine?” Maybe it’s true, but it seems like a justification for this claim in the “Meet Brandon” page would be appropriate.
Yeah, most of the shared hosting companies that are well known are great. If Bluehost works for you, then its perfect.
Personally I’ve had experience with Hostgator, and its always been positive, so that’s why I’m promoting it here.
The truth is that almost all hosts will have a problem or two sometime during the year, but what separates the good from the bad is how they handle it.
Dedicated hosting is usually forced upon you once you hit a few thousand hits per day, depending on bandwidth. (Even though most hosts will call their shared hosting plan “unlimited” it really means unlimited unless you hit a certain threshold.
In my opinion, you need to switch over to a dedicated server the moment your site starts slowing down. The best thing you could do is take a snapshot of your page loading-times right now, and then check back in a month when your traffic has grown. If your site is taking longer to load, anything over .5 seconds is really bad, then its time to upgrade.
The beauty of WPEngine on the other hand is that their ~$25/month plan is on the level or greater than your typical dedicated server, and will save you $75+ per month.
I’ll get on that last part very soon. I’m actually going to be releasing monthly income reports in an attempt to be 100% transparent very soon. That bio part in the sidebar was meant to be snarky, by the way.
Bad hosting didn’t cost you money, poor decisions did. I work for a hosting company, and those annoying reports you had to deal with are serious. If they aren’t dealt with and responded to in a timely manner, your hosting provider can find their servers blacklisted, and unable to send email to many people.
After the first few spam reports, you should have talked to your friend, and had them move their operations elsewhere. Yeah, it wouldn’t have been a fun conversation, but I bet he would have been easy-going about it. Then, you wouldn’t have had to break the agreement with your hosting provider, or had your server suspended.
How long was it between the time that they contacted you, and they suspended the server? Again, this is something that they really have to do to cover themselves. If the spam reports aren’t responded to quickly enough, they get in trouble.
The only issue I see here on your hosting provider’s side is that they suspended the entire server. Only the account in question should have been suspended (not sure how you have things setup), and your main site should have stayed online. If you were running the other site as an add-on domain or something (which you shouldn’t have), then they would have had to suspend your account on the server.
The moral of the story? Don’t let your friends send out mailing lists on your server if that’s your bread and butter. It doesn’t matter if they’re double opt-in with a gigantic unsubscribe button. People will still mark it as spam when they’re tired of getting it.
Honestly, you are 100% right. Maybe I over-emphasized the title.
I should have explained that it was 100% my fault, I just wish they hadn’t shut off my entire server and thrown fees and other things at me so quickly.
After 3, yes three, days of me not responding once they had shut off the server, (because I was on vacation still), they actually sent my information to a debt collection agency.
The main thing is that your points are 100% correct. Thanks for your input!
Shutting off your server after 3 days is ridiculous (or maybe my company is just lax). I actually do most of the work in the department that handles these sort of things, and we almost never take any sort of action unless it’s been at least a week since we contacted the client, with no response. Even a simple “I’m looking into it” will give you more time to keep investigating. And as long as you communicate regularly, we don’t take any action.
The only times that immediate action should be taken is if there is something that is 100% confirmed as spam flowing out of the server. In that case, we either disable the script that’s sending out the spam, or change the password (that’s likely fallen into the wrong hands) on the email account that’s sending.
So yes, while you were in the wrong about those points I brought up earlier, from a hosting standpoint, there are things they could have done a lot differently, that would have retained you as a client.
Better post the name of this hosting provider you had used. Because if there are hidden fees and stuff in their TOS or fine print then people who read your post will read more carefully before going for them.
Like I said, I really was not trying to trash their name, and overall it was my fault for not reading the ToS more carefully. Mainly I’d just recommend for everyone to review anything they agree to. Thanks for your input!