It is amazing to me how people with little or no knowledge or understanding about the ins-and-outs of web hosting will trust their websites to companies that charge them only a few dollars per month. They do not seem to realize that you get what you pay for. When you pay the cheapest possible price, you get the cheapest possible service, with all the ramifications this implies.

I suppose this proves that we are all suckers for a lowball price. GoDaddy, whose shared monthly hosting starts at under $5 a month, is now a multi-billion dollar company that was recently reportedly sold to private equity investors for $2.25 billion. This valuation is largely due to the huge amount of domain registration the company does, but it's also in part due to the bottom dollar pricing of its hosting operations.

Many customers unwittingly set themselves up for higher expenses later on by hosting their sites with companies like GoDaddy, 1and1, iPower, IX Hosting, HostGator, and BlueHost. To their credit, some of these companies are very highly rated by their customers, and if you know the ins-and-outs of web hosting, they can be a good deal. But if you are like most people and understand little or nothing about web or email hosting, they can be a very expensive proposition. This is true because the low-cost outfits are largely self-service operations. As their customer, you are responsible for all the front-end operation of your website. For the most part, all they accept responsibility for is keeping the server up-and-running 24/7/365. Of course, if you have lots of time on your hands, this is not a problem, but if you are like most businesspeople, you cannot afford to spend a lot of time trying to make your northern VA web host work properly.

If you want to have a form on your website that allows customers to fill in the form and have that information (such as an order) sent to you via email, you get your first taste of how helpful your web host really is. GoDaddy, for instance, refuses to help debug your form-to-email scripts, yet they also don't make it easy to figure out how to have the scripts route the mail being generated by the script through their email system. If you know what you are looking for and know where to find it, you can actually find a custom script on their site supplied by GoDaddy which will process the email, but good luck getting their customer service to help you find it, or even to acknowledge that it exists.

If there is a major outage, you also won't likely get much help with it. When a large provider has an outage, their priority is to get the server up-and-running. They figure some customers will leave for another provider, but they're more interested in the law of large numbers. So when you call in to get support about the issue, all you'll get is vague excuses about how they're working on the issue, and you'll never get any pro-rated refunds for an extended outages that last days at a time.

But all that is really secondary. The biggest issue with a cheap host is that you get no real help when it comes to things like installing blog software, solving database issues, resolving email issues, etc. You're mostly on your own, and if you do need their help with a technical issue, they'll be glad to do it at rates that start at $125/hour and work their way up, with a minimum one hour charge.

That's why it's worthwhile to pay a little bit more (not a lot more) for hosting with a company like Virginia Host. Not only do you get personal help with your hosting issues, but if you need us to do some work for you, it'll cost you a lost less. Most hosting issues can be repaired in less than an hour, even those that require work by the hosting provider, and at Virginia Host we only charge based on the actual time the work takes, without any one hour minimum fees.

As the old Shell commercial said back in the 1980s, you can pay me now, or you can pay me later!

Call Virginia Host at 540-428-2787 for all your northern VA web host needs.

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