You get what you pay for

It's amazing to me how easy it is to forget this simple rule: you get what you pay for. I use it quite often with Windows users, and whenever I see an IKEA catalog. But it's clear that either most people haven't learned this lesson, or one of humanity's weaknesses is letting this wisdom go in one ear and out the other. I mean, how else do you explain scams, lotteries, give-aways, and Dell?

The focus today is on web hosts. If you've ever looked into hosting a domain, you'll know there are more hosting companies than lawyers. Okay, that's an exaggeration... There are 43 more lawyers than hosts. (You'll notice I didn't say realtors—in Southern California, realtors outnumber cars).

These days, the price at which you can buy space on a server somewhere is ridiculously low. Some hosts, like "1&1":http://www.1and1.com, even gave it away for awhile. It used to be that $9/mo was cheeeeeap. Now it's more like $2. Yes, folks, you're paying more for that Grilled Stuft Burrito than for your monthly hosting bill. And it's enough to make your head whirl, reading about all the features included with some of these plans: e-commerce! infinite number of email addresses! MondoSiteBuilder! PeonPhotoGallery! Wicked Control Panel used by Many! CGI! Cron! FrontPage! Fantastico!! Guacamole!

Ever get the feeling you're standing in front of a street scam artist's table instead of sitting in front of your computer? Like someone's trying to sell you a crappy watch that your gut tells you is a piece of junk, but the price tag reads $1000 and the guy's offering it to you for $40? It's a great deal! You can't pass this up! Man, look at all you're getting for so little!

Nope, you're getting ripped off. Case in point: the 99.9% uptime guarantee. Everyone's got it. How can you go wrong with 99.9%? That's practically, essentially, why-not-just-think-of-it-as, 100%. Well, it's actually about an hour your site will be down per month. Not too shabby, right? Hmm, well what happens if it's down for an hour during peak business hours?

But let's dig a little deeper. How do you define uptime? Your hosting company might define it a little differently. For example, this site is currently hosted on Host Gator. My site was down for around half an hour midday last Saturday. I happened to notice because I was working on another site hosted on the same account. I contacted support and was told I needed to email sales in order to question the 99.9% uptime guarantee. Armed with reports from WatchMouse indicating my hosted sites had gone down for about half an hour the day prior, in addition to the current situation, I contacted them.

The response? Well it certainly caught me by surprise. They didn't challenge the idea that I didn't have documentation that more than an hour of downtime had been surpassed. They denied everything. On what grounds? Server logs. My server hadn't been rebooted. That's it. And therefore my experience (and let's connect the dots here: the experience of each and every one of my sites' visitors) counts for nothing.

Here's what they had to say about the WatchMouse reports:

bq. The majority of monitoring services report false down times due to them overloading there servers and not checking in real time. I'm sorry to say we cannot give refunds based on inaccurate monitoring services.

While I think this argument in particular isn't worth its weight in rat vomit, I can't entirely fault their position. If the server didn't go down, then haven't they upheld their 99.9% uptime guarantee? And it's here where we have to return to our saying, "you get what you pay for." A good host does far more than ensuring the servers don't go down. It ensures that they are connected to the internet by so many service providers that occasional outages by one or the other won't have an impact on their clients uptime.

Sadly, Host Gator isn't part of that group. And like most hosting companies, their customer service is abysmal. They value their server logs over their customers. I expressed my dissatisfaction and indicated I would be looking for another host. They sent me the link to their cancellation form.

I should have known better. Take a look at their "comparison chart for their reseller plans":http://www.hostgator.com/resellers.shtml. Notice anything strange? Every plan has every feature! That tells me only one thing: there's a lot they're not telling me. They've removed every server feature that I might have use for but that they don't offer, just to give you the appearance that they have everything you could possible want. It's a straw man argument, in chart form.

I've heard a lot of great things about "DreamHost":http://www.dreamhost.com and they're local which is something I'm starting to think is a very good thing. So far I haven't seen any of the smoke and mirrors that are so irritatingly common in that industry. But I guess I'll find out soon enough.