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Looking for a web host for your website? Ever feel like some of the things being promised are far fetched? Check this list to see if your host has done this to you! And if they have: run, don’t walk.. get far far away! There are plenty of web hosts in the market to not waste your time and money with the bad ones.

1. WE OFFER TERABYTES OF SPACE.. ALL FOR $1.. WE PROMISE!

You’ve seen all the offers.. tens of thousands of gigabytes.. thousands of terabytes.. all for just a few dollars. Think it’s too good to be true? Well, it is. How do you think the hosts afford all that space? It’s a simple trick that is known as “overselling” in the web hosting world. Hosts sell 100x-1000x more space then they actually have hoping you don’t use it. And what happens if you start using it? Well if you read their terms of service, most of these hosts control your account based on cpu usage. At the same time, “file storage” isn’t allowed. So as soon as you upload more than 1gb, or get more then a few thousand visitors on your site, you will find your site gone. Of course none of the hosts want you to know this, so they hide it in confusing fine print and terms of service aggreements. I hate to say it, but mom & pop might have been right… if it’s too good to be true, it probably is a scam.

2. WE HAVE BEEN IN BUSINESS FOR DECADES.

I find it funny how several well known hosts claim to have been around for “decades”. Another one boldly states “In Business since 1988″. I hate to break it to you guys, but there wasn’t really such a thing as web hosting back then. I’ve been involved in the hosting industry almost since the beginning, and I know for a fact there weren’t any $5/mo hosts around in the 1980′s. Before believing a hosts claim, check the whois on the domain and see when they registered it. The funny part is that most hosts that claim to be more than 10 years old haven’t been around more than a 1 year! Obviously they don’t want you to know this, so do your due diligence and make sure you don’t get scammed by a fly-by-night host.

3. WE HAVE OUR OWN DATACENTER – THOUSANDS OF SQ FEET

Face it, no matter what web host you go to, their site has pictures of huge datacenters, thousands of servers! Unfortunatly, most web hosts are just “re-sellers”. Just people with some spare time that rent some space on someones server for $20/mo and try to re-sell the space to a 100+ people. Best way to check? Ask for the address and other information on their datacenter. The trick here is that many hosts will give you the information of their providers datacenter (who they are renting from!), but if you are persistent enough and dig around you should be able to dig up the truth.

4. OUR HOSTING IS ONLY $5/MO – BUT YOU HAVE TO SIGN UP UNTIL 2050.

I don’t know what it is these days, but web hosting used to follow the logic of “what you see is what you get”. Now you have everyone advertising plans for $5/mo, but when you get to their website you find out it’s $20/month! What’s the deal?? Well it turns out that you need to sign up for 2 years, 3 years or even 5 years to get the “$5/mo”. Is it just me, or is that not $5/mo? That would be $300/5years, not $5/mo! The worst part is that you usually don’t realize a host is doing this until you get to the final part in the check out. Do your research! Make sure when they say $5/mo, they mean $5/mo! Not $300 for 5 years divided by 60!