Cutting through the Hype After sifting through the Internet you will find that 90% of hosting providers offer the same service which we will call Domain Hosting. Domain Hosting includes hosting your domain, www.yourcompany.com, so that you can have a website and email addresses.

Transfer Sometimes referred to as bandwidth, transfer is the amount of data you are allowed to move to and from your domain over a period of time - this includes email and website traffic. The amount of data you transfer is usually tracked monthly with the usage getting reset at the end of your billing cycle.

Disk Space You may see it called storage, disk space is the amount of room you have to store data in your domain. Disk space is measured in either Megabytes(MB) or Gigabytes(GB) where one GB is equal to 1000 MB.

Common Ploys That’s it. You now have the knowledge to choose a Hosting provider based on the two fundamental measures: transfer and disk space. But you should read on - there are several marketing ploys used to convince you to sign-up for service, only to leave you stuck when you realize you did not get what you expected.

1) Payment terms The most blatant marketing gimmick is to offer a basement-bottom price, something in bright colors that is made to look attractive.(Some companies have even been known to have TV commercials with swimsuit models that advertise hosting and domain registration.) The fact that a price seems cheap is the first and most important warning flag. Often you must agree to pay the amount for an entire year to get the price that is advertised; some companies require you to sign a two-year contract! Though you typically get a short trial period in which you can get a refund, it takes months to realize the quality of a hosting provider. By the time you have your first outage or support issue your refund period has expired and you have no recourse.

2) Transfer as a Gimmick Recently many hosting companies have begun offering extremely high amounts of transfer. With a complete website size of under 20 MB many businesses are drawn in by companies that offer 250 GB, or more, of transfer each month. What these companies will not tell you on the front page is that they limit the types of files you can transfer, specifically they must be files that compose the website. This does not include media files which many business and individuals like to include on websites. Limiting the type of files that you are allowed to transfer makes the amount of transfer irrelevent.

3) Bandwidth Throttling Under times of heavy use many companies will limit the amount of bandwidth you have available by throttling, or reducing the speed at which your site can be viewed by visitors. Overloading servers with accounts will also give the same effect. Network resources such as Servers and Bandwidth are fixed costs for many hosting companies; a company can increase margins by putting more websites on a single server. The more websites on a server the fewer resources available to each website. The sites will still work but your performance will drop as each website fights for the resources provided by the server.

4) Disk Space as a Gimmick Many hosting companies will limit the types of data you can store on your website. Because you are restricted in the way you can use your disk space, you will be provided a ridiculously large amount of storage. As a background, premium disk space costs an IT company like IBM or EDS 4.00-20.00$ per GB of disk space. If you find a provider that gives you 1000 GB for 3.95$ per month, that is your warning sign that there are restrictions in the fine print. Also, some companies will limit the types of files you can store on your domain. All the disk space in the world is useless if you cannot use it without restriction.

Conclusion The most important thing you can do is create a relationship with a service provider that will help you accomplish your goals. We built Utropicmedia Network Solutions to be up-front - whether it’s pricing, support or developing new tools, our goal is to keep things simple so you can get more done. Please visit us at http://utropicmedia.net for more information on the services we provide. Be sure to check out the hosting page to see a no-nonsense list of packages that give you the tools to help your business grow.