Posted on March 23rd, 2010All industries and companies make mistakes and web hosting businesses are no exception. Web hosting industry is a place where the services and products offered depend on many variables and as such, nearly everything imaginable can go horrendously wrong.
1) Offering Unlimited Bandwidth and Space: Offering unlimited bandwidth and space is silly simply because it is essentially impossible to honor the promise. Web hosts can’t feasibly offer unlimited bandwidth and space to customers. When those customers start using a lot of resources, hosts will be forced to adjust the resources allocation or worse shut down their accounts. This chain of events can result in more than a few PR disasters.
2) Big Promotions on New Services: After launching a big thing or two (such as implementing a new technology), the first action is to start promoting it intensely, but it can be a prelude to financial disaster. The reason? Many web hosts don’t have the experience, technical expertise and/or workforce to support new technologies they are unfamiliar with during a peak time.
3) Trying to be Hilarious at the Wrong Time: If a company tries to make a joke at a serious problem (like what DreamHost did with their billing fiasco), you’re guaranteed to aggravate customers. No customers involved in a critical situation want the company to take it too lightly. If something big happens, companies need to treat it seriously.
4) Poor Redundancy: Many datacenters have gone down a long amount of time because they didn’t properly test the power supplies and backup generators. Servers need to have redundant power supply because even a well-maintained generator can be unreliable sometimes.
5) Claiming Low-end Sempron and Celeron Servers Are Reliable: Smaller companies love Intel Celeron servers because they’re generally pretty affordable. When they’re cheap to the web hosts, they’re cheap to the customers. However, dedicated server companies frequently make the dumb mistakes of marketing low-end Sempron and Celeron servers as the best hardware with superior reliability.
6) Using Outsourcing Firms: Those firms can be handy and some of them are excellent, but most of outsourcing firms are absolutely horrifying. Hiring other company to fill your helpdesk positions with incompetent employees is a big mistake.
7) Offering Free Trials Without Asking For Credit Card Information: From time to time web hosts will offer an attractive free trial without asking for credit card information to verify the customers. It is an invitation to spammers, fraudsters and webmasters who run illicit web sites. They will login, send thousands of spam, and run away. The only thing the web hosts is left with is a bucketful of problems.
8.) Not Honoring Guarantees: Basically reputable major web hosts have a money back guarantee. Most have a support and/or uptime guarantee, however, when a web host can’t honor their guarantees they offer or set so many requirements that nearly no one qualifies, they’re just asking for a big trouble. It’s quite easy for customers to cause a big stir on an unexpected occurrence and when companies fail to deal with the problem, it makes one wonder if a web host is dumb or just cheap.
9) Not Hiring Competent People: A business is only as good as its personnel. When companies hire employees just to get “warm bodies” to sit on chairs, they are not doing their customers or themselves any favors. It’s better to be short-handed while having a few great people than to be badly overstaffed with morons.
10) Expanding Too Fast: Countless businesses make the mistake of expanding too fast. Web hosts are no exception. Some web hosts think it’s a great idea to keep growing even though they’re having many problems keeping up with customer support and orders.
11) Promotional Gimmicks: Not every gimmick, product, or feature that a web host launches “revolutionizes the web hosting industry.” As a matter of fact, most of them are not all they’re cracked up to be. Hosting companies that rely too much on marketing surprises are in for a nasty surprise.
12) Hiding A Few Things in the Terms of Service: For each thing that a web host hides in the TOS, they are hurting themselves in the long run. Hiding things in the TOS is a dumb move and entirely useless. Customers will eventually spot them and complain.
13) Using Too Much Clichés on Marketing Material: We’ve seen all the well-worn pictures of a smiling, attractive woman leaning on a server rack? What about a close up picture on a server rack with blinking LEDs and cable? Using too much of those already overused pictures is a bad idea.
Needless to say, web hosting services can and often do the above mistakes. Every industry has a few ignorant companies that just don’t understand what it takes to have a successful, ethical business process.
very good advice i will follow it in my business