Switching Hosts to Host Gator
March 11th 2009
If you’re really trying to make money online, having a dependable webhost is so important.
I’ve been through a couple of different hosts.
First I had a friend give me free hosting! Yup, 100% free. He had a reseller account.
But I never felt right about it when I noticed that the type of account said ‘Educational.’ He was teaching a course at a college so he qualified for an educational reseller account which is discounted from a regular reseller account. But that really should be for your students who can’t afford to pay a lot for hosting. It shouldn’t be for your friend who is trying to make money online.
So when my conscious kicked in, I decided it was time to join the rest of the world and pay for hosting. But who to try??
I went online and carefully read hosting reviews. Be warned: websites that are dedicated to reviews are usually biased. They’re getting a commission if you sign up for that particular webhost, so they’re not objective.
The best place to evaluate webhosts is in forums. And a lot of the forum posts said that a good host is A Small Orange. So that’s who I went with for about a year.
The features I wanted were a cheap price (since I’m not making much money online yet) and lots of add-on domains. They had an unbeatable offer: $5.00/month for hosting with unlimited add-ons domains.
I couldn’t beat that with a stick. So I went with them.
Now let me start by saying that their customer service is unbeatable. Even though I’m not a huge paycheck for them, I get an immediate response when I send an email to customer service. Within minutes I get a response, and their staff seems to be pretty knowledgeable.
So why am I leaving them?
Because my websites are constantly down!
It seems about half the time I randomly check my sites, they are down. I email them and the problem is resolved within minutes (they probably just reboot the server), but it still happens quite a bit.
When it first started occurring, they moved me to a different server. Well I’m now on the third server and it still happens.
How many times are my sites down when I don’t check? Every time my site goes down, I’m losing money twice; once because I’m losing potential sales and once because I’m paying for Google Adwords clicks that send the visitor nowhere.
So back to research.
This time I took a different approach. Instead of looking at what people said were good hosts, I did some spying.
There’s a site called spacebankers.com. I know this guy is making a lot of money with it. I actually bought it myself once. (Never used it; wasn’t for me, and then the guy wouldn’t refund my money even though he said he would. But that’s a different story.)
So I decided whatever host he’s using is good enough for me. If his site goes down, he would be losing a lot more money than I would.
It’s pretty easy to figure out who someone’s host is. Just go to Who Is and search for the domain. In this case, looking at spacebankers.com showed me that the nameservers resolved to hostgator servers.
Hmm…HostGator. Never heard of them before. But then I started poking around for HostGator and found a lot of satisfied people. They seem to be up a lot (I had never seen the spacebankers site down) so I decided to give them a try. I’ll be paying a little more each month (about $9.95). But…here’s the great part.
Hostgator has a lot of discount coupons to try to get your business. Their usual ones are the first month for $.01 (a penny) or 20% off your initial order. You can only use one of these coupons, so if you’re going to be paying month-by-month, it makes sense to get your first month for $.01 (the 20% off would only save you 1.99). But if you purchase hosting for a whole year ($119.40) the 20% off coupon will save you $23.88.
But wait, it gets even better!
I saw this:
$50 HostGator Rebate.
There’s a website that actually will send you $50.00 if you go to Host Gator through their website and then sign up (click on the link above to go to their page) Why do they do it? They’re probably getting a commission for sending Host Gator your business. But I didn’t care; I had already decided to go with Host Gator anyway. And this way I’ll get $50 more off. That’s like getting a year of hosting for $3.79/month!
Now THAT you can’t beat with a stick!
Since I just switched to them, I’ll update this post to tell you
a) whether I really got my $50.00 rebate (you have to wait 30 days) and
b) whether I’m happy with Host Gator.
I’ve been through a couple of different hosts.
First I had a friend give me free hosting! Yup, 100% free. He had a reseller account.
But I never felt right about it when I noticed that the type of account said ‘Educational.’ He was teaching a course at a college so he qualified for an educational reseller account which is discounted from a regular reseller account. But that really should be for your students who can’t afford to pay a lot for hosting. It shouldn’t be for your friend who is trying to make money online.
So when my conscious kicked in, I decided it was time to join the rest of the world and pay for hosting. But who to try??
I went online and carefully read hosting reviews. Be warned: websites that are dedicated to reviews are usually biased. They’re getting a commission if you sign up for that particular webhost, so they’re not objective.
The best place to evaluate webhosts is in forums. And a lot of the forum posts said that a good host is A Small Orange. So that’s who I went with for about a year.
The features I wanted were a cheap price (since I’m not making much money online yet) and lots of add-on domains. They had an unbeatable offer: $5.00/month for hosting with unlimited add-ons domains.
I couldn’t beat that with a stick. So I went with them.
Now let me start by saying that their customer service is unbeatable. Even though I’m not a huge paycheck for them, I get an immediate response when I send an email to customer service. Within minutes I get a response, and their staff seems to be pretty knowledgeable.
So why am I leaving them?
Because my websites are constantly down!
It seems about half the time I randomly check my sites, they are down. I email them and the problem is resolved within minutes (they probably just reboot the server), but it still happens quite a bit.
When it first started occurring, they moved me to a different server. Well I’m now on the third server and it still happens.
How many times are my sites down when I don’t check? Every time my site goes down, I’m losing money twice; once because I’m losing potential sales and once because I’m paying for Google Adwords clicks that send the visitor nowhere.
So back to research.
This time I took a different approach. Instead of looking at what people said were good hosts, I did some spying.
There’s a site called spacebankers.com. I know this guy is making a lot of money with it. I actually bought it myself once. (Never used it; wasn’t for me, and then the guy wouldn’t refund my money even though he said he would. But that’s a different story.)
So I decided whatever host he’s using is good enough for me. If his site goes down, he would be losing a lot more money than I would.
It’s pretty easy to figure out who someone’s host is. Just go to Who Is and search for the domain. In this case, looking at spacebankers.com showed me that the nameservers resolved to hostgator servers.
Hmm…HostGator. Never heard of them before. But then I started poking around for HostGator and found a lot of satisfied people. They seem to be up a lot (I had never seen the spacebankers site down) so I decided to give them a try. I’ll be paying a little more each month (about $9.95). But…here’s the great part.
Hostgator has a lot of discount coupons to try to get your business. Their usual ones are the first month for $.01 (a penny) or 20% off your initial order. You can only use one of these coupons, so if you’re going to be paying month-by-month, it makes sense to get your first month for $.01 (the 20% off would only save you 1.99). But if you purchase hosting for a whole year ($119.40) the 20% off coupon will save you $23.88.
But wait, it gets even better!
I saw this:
$50 HostGator Rebate.
There’s a website that actually will send you $50.00 if you go to Host Gator through their website and then sign up (click on the link above to go to their page) Why do they do it? They’re probably getting a commission for sending Host Gator your business. But I didn’t care; I had already decided to go with Host Gator anyway. And this way I’ll get $50 more off. That’s like getting a year of hosting for $3.79/month!
Now THAT you can’t beat with a stick!
Since I just switched to them, I’ll update this post to tell you
a) whether I really got my $50.00 rebate (you have to wait 30 days) and
b) whether I’m happy with Host Gator.
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