Ecommerce Web Design Blog

Is free hosting too good to be true? How do you know if you're getting good value for money with your web hosting?

What are the disadvantages of free hosting providers?

There are many companies who will accuse paid web hosting services as being overpriced and exorbitant. They claim that free hosting is a much better solution. For some people, free hosting has its advantages but before jumping into a free hosting solution, it is worthwhile considering the disadvantages of free hosting as well. Then you can make an informed decision.

• Banners! - free hosts have to make money like everyone else, so generally rely on advertising to do so. This means you may have to have banner advertisements displayed prominently in your site which can affect your site design.
• Little support - free hosts rarely provide easy-to-access support. Some will provide forums where you can post questions and may or may not get an answer. Customers who switch to us from free hosting providers often explain that where they were provided with support they were made to feel like they were very low priority customers
• Server overload - to keep their costs down, many free hosting providers cram as many websites into their servers as possible. This can affect their performance or lead to downtime if the server gets overloaded and needs to be rebooted
• Features and benefits - free hosts often provide shared services and settings. You don't have the flexibility to request site setting changes and may or may not be able to install the applications you want. Advanced features such as domain names, sophisticated email services and database driven websites may not be offered

What about paid providers? Is cheaper better?

If you shop around when searching for a hosting provider in Australia, you will generally find low, medium and high priced providers. How do you decide between them?

• Does it follow that the high cost ones are overpriced and the cheaper ones are better value for money? No
• The most expensive sites may not be good value for money because the service may not match the price you pay.
• The cheap sites may not be good value for money either because your space, traffic or performance may be restricted. The old adage is often true: you get what you pay for.

To try and get the best value for money for you when buying hosting think about the following:

• If you're looking at a cheap provider, ask them how many other sites they are hosting on their servers. The more crammed their servers are, the worse the performance your site may be.
• Do a search for their company on Australian web hosting forums like 'whirlpool'. A company that frequently runs into negative comments on there may be someone you have to look at more closely before buying
• Find out how much bandwidth and data transfer you get for your money. How does it compare to competitors who charge the same price?
• What features do you get? Does the host have spam protection? Do they run the right scripting language for your site? If it's PHP, what version do they use?
• What is the balance between setup fees and monthly cost? If there is a setup cost balance this out against the monthly fees. Osc Works does not charge any setup cost for web hosting.
• What level of uptime do you get?
• What level of support do you get?

What dates did Google comprehensively update its toolbar figures?

Google assigns every page on the Internet that it indexes a PageRank number, which is an indication of how important Google considers that page to be relative to other pages of its type. A key factor Google uses in determining PageRank is the number of other sites that link to an indexed page.

Approximately every 3 months, Google publishes its PageRank information to the Google Toolbar which can be downloaded and installed on your computer.

Here are some dates of previous PageRank updates:

27.7.2008 - 7+ months between major updates
27.10.2007 - 180 days between updates
30.04.2007 - 97 days between updates
25.01.2007 - 15 days between updates
10.01.2007 - 104 days between updates

28.09.2006 - 77 days between updates
13.07.2006 - 100 days between updates
04.04.2006 - 45 days between updates
18.02.2006 - 122 days between updates