Where?! Hey! Wait, is this a scam?

No. But I see that you’re familiar with darker side internet marketing, however don’t get overly excited. Having said that though, I strongly suggest that you not  jump at the first free hosting offer that comes spamming into your inbox, because it probably is a scam.

The fact is there is lots of “free hosting” but it is not always called “hosting”. It goes by other names.

Its started from the edges with services that are sometimes included with hosting, like email. Now days free email can be had from Google with Gmail, Yahoo, hotmail, etc.  Then along came Google Analytics. Back when Google Analytics was known as Urchin Statistics it was a pricey add-on, or sometimes a nice premium feature offered by the larger hosting companies.

Then there are the photo sharing sites: Flickr, Snapfish, Picasa, shutterfly, etc.

Next comes the blogs. It’s hard to connect to the internet without tripping over a free blog offer. Blogger, Wordpress (the blog service not just the software), livejournal and dozens of other services. Then there is Myspace, the personal networking site for the young at heart that gives you your own home page.

More recently Google has been offering “Apps for your Domain”, which include Gmail, a small brochure site for which Google incorporates a simple web-based site builder, Web mail (Gmail) and intranet applications like web spreadsheet, word processing and file storage. The kicker though, is that your web pages show up on your own domain name not a google subdomain.

But there are other applications besides blogs or CMS. More free hosting components like Google Checkout — a complete web shopping cart — and video hosting in the form of YouTube to mention just two, have been making waves.  I have stumbled upon dozens of other free video hosting sites in the last year.  

So if you want to publish this type of content, you begin to ask yourself, “I would want to pay for web hosting because…?” Because indeed.

One answer to that question would be because you want to run a specific web application or web software. To do that you have to shell out some jack. Not a huge amount. But you have to pick the right web hosting for what you want to do.

So how do you pick the right hosting service? That sounds suspiciously like a segue doesn’t

Picking a hosting company is a subject for another article.

Happy trails.

Are you in control of your domain name, or is your hosting provider calling the shots. I can best illustrate this issue by telling a little parable about…you.

Let’s say you signed up for hosting at AcmeBigFrackingHosting.com because they offered “FREE Domain Registration” With every hosting account.

Cool.

Now you have your web hosting and your domain name. You don’t know domain names from Adam’s knee-brace but you have one and you didn’t have to pay for it and now you have a website. But after a couple of months you notice the your site is kind of slow, and it takes 72 hour to get your support ticket answered.

Four months later, you’re fed up. You find a new hosting company. They are not huge but they reek of competence. Forum questions are answered in 10 minutes or less. Their online community is just a thriving, nurturing love fest with more How-Tos and Tutorials than you can shake a stick at. By all accounts their servers are fast, reliable and overflowing with cool software packages.

You submit a question about transferring your site and they respond in 5 min saying “Absolutely!”. You sign up; your site is active in 5 mins. Oh man! You could get used to this type of service! You receive your account info email from new hosting company with instructions for “pointing” your old domain name to your site at the new hosting company.

You need to change your “Authoritative Name Servers” for you domain to the servers that your new hosting company uses. This is the one thing they can’t do for you. They helped you transfer all your pages and database content. But since domain names are very important only the owner, administrative or technical contact for the domain is allowed to change the name servers. Hmmm. Okay. You got this far, how hard could it be?

With mild trepidation you go back to your old web host and look for a way of changing your “Authoritative name servers”.

But you find…nothing. Nada. Not a word to be found. Just that same #$%&@ “Free Domain Name” headline that sucked you in 6 months ago. You submit a ticket. They respond after 60 hours – unusually prompt – and say okay, they’ll do it.

A week later your domain is still not changed. You forum post, protesting. Nothing. Forum flame post. The silence is deafening.

You scream and yell and frighten the bejeezus out of your cat. You throw things and stick pins in little hosting company dolls. But you just wear yourself out eventually and end up reading about domain dispute procedure and ICAAN. Yep, that’ll take a few months at least.

Your stuck. You swallow hard and register another domain. All your traffic is gone with the other domain wherever that may be. And you begin the slow hard work of re-building traffic to your new domain address at your new hosting account.

After six months you have built your traffic back up and then some. And with the new hosting company’s support you have learned a lot more about domain names, DNS, and site building. Your wiser, more knowledgeable, and you just graduated from anger management class. All is good.

Then you receive a letter from your old hosting company. Remember them? It’s a bill. What? They just charged you $35 for renewing your old domain name. You read it 4 more times, but it still seems surreal. Or like a bad practical joke.

Your cat takes one look at you standing there with bill in hand, and quietly sneaks out of the room as your hands begin to shake uncontrollably.

One reason web hosting companies are going through this turmoil is that they are facing increasing competition from each other in recent years, mainly because there are just so many of them now. There seems to be a hosting company on every corner, which inevitably leads competition based on price which most would agree can deteriorate into a race to the bottom, to the chagrin of both the hosting companies and their potential customers.

One reason this has come about is that control panel software has made the learning curve for running a web server much lower. With software like CPanel’s Web Host Manager, you only need a general understanding of the underlying operating system to be able to create and configure web hosting accounts.

This has led to a number of players entering into the field that are not prepared by either experience or temperament to be running any type of business. It is entirely conceivable that a hosting company could be set up by high school students, who no doubt find it frighteningly easy and exciting to buy server space in the form of a 20-dollar-per-month reseller account, and then set up accounts from their bedroom using the control panel.

This problem isn’t necessarily caused by high school students, I am sure. There are many folks starting a hosting company and failing that are old enough to know better. Regardless, after a few months or a year they lose interest in the day-to-day responsibilities that come with maintaining a strong customer base.

After they get a few paying customers, they no longer find is very exciting to deal with answering customer phone calls about billing or helping a newbie customer sort out the problems with a Front Page created web site. Plus they haven’t done any type of business planning to figure out what they need to do to sustain the business in staffing, financing or marketing.

Don’t misunderstand me. There are plenty of competent people out there who work hard and have exceptional expertise. There are just too many wannabes trying to make a quick buck.

One site that I recommend you visit to research a web hosting company is WebHostingTalk.com. This is a free forum site where webmasters and web hosters hang out just talk shop, discuss common issues and give their honest option about who can be trusted with their web site.

Another way to research a web host is to look at their forum site, if they have one. Is it an active and thriving community or a ghost town with no recent posts? When customers post questions on the support forum, look at the timestamps to see how long it takes someone to answer the post. What is the overall mood of the forum? Helpful and nurturing or is it an angry undisciplined flame fest. If it’s the latter then run way fast.

The absence of a an active forum doesn’t necessarily mean the company is a lousy hosting provider. But the presence of one does help you gauge the competence and temperament of the hosting provider much more accurately than by any other means short of signing up for an account.

A very good example of one such provider is httpme.com. Their entire web site is just a community forum, open to anyone, customers and visitors alike.

In upcoming posts, I’ll delve into some of the of the dirty little secrets that some hosting companies would prefer you didn’t know about.

‘Til then, happy trails.

But my trajectory is not so far from human society that I haven’t felt a tug from that particular graviton of zeitgeist, so I’ve begun my slow spiral toward that center looking for some stable, less-occupied lane within which to orbit.

Most likely I’ll arc out a chaotic path somewhere outside the crowded center, dancing around it at a safe distance, keeping clear of random collisions and maintaining a less myopic perspective on the goings-on there.

Okay. Now I’m done with the over-wrought metaphors. Honest.