Marketing Blunders - Web Hosting

In this first installment of our series of marketing blunders, we're going to start out with one of the biggest marketing blunders that marketers can make. This one starts right out of the gate when they choose their web hosting. These blunders go from bad to worse. This article is going to cover some of the more common ones as well as the most serious.

The first marketing blunder a new marketer makes when it comes to web hosting is that they go for the cheap, or worse, free. Let me tell you what you get with free web hosting so that you know never to even bother with it. For one thing, with free web hosting, you don't get your own domain. You get something like www.somestupidsite.com/members/webarea/yourarea/index.html. This is NO way to establish a web presence. Nobody is going to know you from Adam. You will never see a big name marketer or web site using free hosting.

Another reason that free hosting is the pits is because you are literally at their mercy. You're not paying anything so they can make you put up with anything that they want, not the least of which is horrible banner ads, annoying pop ups and whatever else they want to load onto your site. Anybody who goes to your site is first going to see what your hosting company wants to show them before they ever get to see YOUR offer. Most people will automatically think "new person" and be off and running. You'll have no credibility with free web hosting.

Another problem with free web hosting is that you get literally no bandwidth and no disk space. If your business ever gets to the point where you're actually bringing visitors to it, you'll most likely get shut down because you've exceeded your bandwidth. As for disk space, there is none. A good free hosting service might give you 10 meg. These days, that's not even enough to put one good download on it. You simply can't run a business under those conditions.

The worst part about free web hosting, however, is that they can take your site away from you at any time. They don't even have to have a reason. After all, they're not getting any money from you. And if you should get any spam complaints at all, unlike a paid hosting service that will either at least give you a warning or simply ignore them if they are isolated incidents, a free hosting company will simply shut you down, no questions asked and no chance to give them your side of the story.

Even with paid web hosting, in many cases you get what you pay for. If you go with a no name hosting company charging you $2 a month, don't expect to get any kind of reliable service. We haven't even talked about the issue of uptime, but with free and cheap hosting, you can't expect uptime to be very good. I know some web hosting companies that charge a good amount of money that don't have good uptime stats. With a free or cheap service, you have no chance.

If you want to do business online, get a hosting company with a good reputation and good service. You may pay a little more, but in the end, isn't your business worth it?

To YOUR Success