Pay monthly web hosting - What you should know before choosing a Web Host...

Unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth - everything unlimited. Excellent!

	Not so excellent... The term unlimited is now more than often used to suck unsuspecting shoppers into the claws of a questionable host. The clipping on the left was taken from a web hosting site in August 2009. They are offering an unlimited plan for only £2.95 a month. This clearly appears to be a mouth-watering hosting plan which needs to be snapped up quickly, before they change their mind. Sadly, there is little truth in their "Unlimited" claim. The clipping below was taken from the same site on the same day. This shows part of their terms, which clearly states that their Unlimited hosting plan is limited to 50,000 inodes. Use more than this limit, and your hosting account gets deleted - just like that!
The Secret behind Unlimited Hosting Offers Most web hosting shoppers have never heard about inodes. You may come across it if you did read the terms of your potential new UNLIMITED host (most users don't bother to read terms), but as the sales blurb apparently makes it crystal clear that the deal was for a completely unlimited hosting account, many will ignore the mention of inode limits in a host's terms and ignorantly sign up. After all, it says 50,000 - that is a lot of inodes, whatever they are. An inode is generally only known to those running or working in a datacentre and its meaning is not openly discussed for obvious reasons, as its technical term reveals the Secret behind Unlimited Hosting Offers. What is an inode? An inode is a data structure holding information about files on a Unix file system. There is an inode for each file and a file is uniquely identified by the file system on which it resides and its inode number on that system. Each inode contains information about a file such as mode and type of file, links to the file, user ids, size of the file and modification times. In short, every time a file is created or uploaded, an inode is created. Put simply, one could say inodes is the count of the files on your web hosting account. Your UNLIMITED account is actually limited to 50,000 files. On the face of it, 50 thousand inodes sound a lot, but it isn't. Inodes do not only apply to your web page files, image files and scripts - they also apply to ALL files created by the web server, database server, mailserver and all kinds of other processes, including system log files etc. Every time your mailbox is sent an email, a new inode is created. And if it could not be delivered, another inode is created. Lots of spam sent to your email addresses means lots of new inodes and if you have dead links or missing graphics on your site, even more inodes are created. And depending on what type of pages you publish, every time someone visits your site, inodes could be created all over the place. How big a site can I run with 50,000 inodes? A 50,000 inode quota is sufficient to maintain several small websites, or one large website (but not too large). If your site is hosted by a web host who offers everything unlimited, but with a limited inode quota, you will need to watch carefully on a daily basis that your site does not get too busy. If your site is getting busy, you should move it away from your unlimited host onto a limited account with another host as quickly as possible to prevent the risk of downtime due to deletion by the unlimited host for busting their inode limit. A web host selling you unlimited hosting with a limited inode quota is the same as a car salesman selling you a car which does unlimited mileage on one tank of petrol, as long as you do not drive it more than 350 miles. To find out more, search for 50000 inodes on google.com. Here are more thoughts on this unlimited stuff. X9 Internet imposes NO inode limits to any of its hosting accounts - we trust our clients to observe our fair use policies
Some more must read tips about the hosting industry, and how to avoid being taken for a ride! 1. Scam Plans If it sounds too good to be true it usually is! All Hosting Firms have the same basic limitations when it comes to server resources and system specifications. There is no magic server that has a never ending supply of ram and cpu. If a host claims to give unlimited or unusually high amounts of web space or bandwidth, START ASKING QUESTIONS. The thing to remember is that the average web site uses about 50 Mb web space and less then 1Gb bandwidth a month. So what hosting companies do is - they lie! They make up scam packages apparently offering unlimited web space with 30Gb of monthly bandwidth, or even unmetered bandwidth for around ten or twenty pounds a year. They are playing the numbers game.... Only one or two of every 100 people that subscribe to such a package are going to use the 30 Gb bandwidth, or an amount of bandwidth which costs the web host more than they charged their customer for this package. So what do they do? They terminate the sites that use this much bandwidth, saying, "Your site is using too many resources." They aren't lying about the resource usage, it's the truth! Most people don't realise that bandwidth and web space used have nothing to do with the server resources being used. Resource usage has to do with the amount of cpu and ram a site uses. When a customer uses his allocated 30Gb bandwidth quota as advertised, he is told his account has been terminated because his site is using up most of the servers' cpu and ram, although in reality, his site was terminated because it was using nearly 30Gb of bandwidth. 2. Why Pay Yearly Another thing you'll notice is that most of these incredible scam packages force you to pay for a year up front to get the good pricing. Why would a hosting company care if you pay monthly or yearly? After all, if you are satisfied with their service, you're going to employ their services for much longer then a year. High merchant fees aren't really an issue too, so why? It's because most have horrible support, slow servers, or even tons of downtime. If you were paying month to month you're not going to put up with it, but if you paid for a year up front what are you going to do. You won't get your money back so you have no choice but to stay with them. Pay monthly. However, we do offer one budget package which is offered with a yearly payment option only, because it is senseless to set up a monthly direct debit to collect 63 pence. Our other packages have yearly and monthly prices listed on our site mainly because some people prefer to pay yearly. 3. Domain Name Tips Do not join a host that includes a free domain name with their hosting package, as they generally register themselves as the domain owner. If you have not been registered as the legitimate domain owner by a web host, they could blackmail you into staying with them because you couldn't take the domain to another host as you are not the registered owner. You will not be able to prove it is your domain by proving you paid for it - if your name is not listed as the registrant in a whois lookup, then the domain is not yours! 4. A few more tests to check out how legit a web host is How long have they been around? We began hosting when we registered X9.NET on 18-Jul-1998 (That's 12 years ago!) 1998 was also the year we became an accredited Nominet registrar for .UK domains, first with the tag GOHOT and later with the tag X9INTERNET. And both tags are current to this day. To check out other web hosts, do a whois lookup on their domain name. Then look for the creation date of the domain name. If the domain name was created less then 2 years ago, it's more of a risk to join that web host. They could be a great host, but considering more then 95% of new hosts go out of business within the first 2 years, that really isn't something you should be taking a chance on. It's now too easy to become a web host. All someone has to do is purchase our reseller package and bingo! - he or she is a web host. Sure, the hosting may be good, but that doesn't mean good support is being offered, nor does it mean our reseller-hosting bill is paid on time. 5. Uptime If a hosting company claims 100% uptime all the time, they are lying. All servers need to be rebooted every now and then for security and software updates. X9 follows the sun clock when scheduling maintenance, for example, UK maintenance is carried out between 02.00 and 04.00 GMT if required, and maintenance on US servers is carried out between 07.00 and 09.00 GMT, again, only if required. This is not a nightly routine. Average downtime is around 10 minutes. We only guarantee a 99.9% uptime because we are being realistic. Please note that our uptime guarantee does not cover hardware failure, system crashes caused by ambitious users and acts of God, including earthquake & flooding, as well as downtime caused by terrorist or war action, or the Gas Board doing some digging outside and cutting through our cables (It happened in Feb 2009).