Pitfalls of Shared Web Hosting
We are on a new web host. They are better than the last bunch. However I have some observations about shared hosting companies in general.
- All such companies make promises they don’t keep. If a web host says they will move your site — it won’t happen or they will mess it up. You will have to do it yourself or hire a professional to complete the move.
- Email will be a headache. Nobody tells you how to access your email unless you use Outlook or Thunderbird. They say you are incompetent if you don’t use one of these two email clients.
- Small problems turn into big problems because of the interaction between ISP, web host, and client software.
- Web hosting companies, ISP’s, etc., etc., all think they are alone in the world and rarely make any effort to understand how to interact in a productive way. If they do make the effort, they seem unable to communicate to their customers how to make thing work together.
- Extensive investigation to find the causes of problems is your job, even if the web host caused the problem.
- Answering a support request in an unhelpful manner is worse than not answering.
- Web host operations think they are selling technology to geeks, when in reality, they are selling a service to ordinary people with some technical knowledge. They don’t understand that a service is something that takes away the customer’s pain rather than adding to it.
