There’s an old adage: Don’t take things for granted.
And I guess ValueWeb, one of the oldest web hosting companies, does take things for granted.
One of my web management client has finally ran out of his patient and finally decided to leave ValueWeb for HostGator.
Sure, ValueWeb’s services are as reliable as most others. However, for the price tags they have, their web hosting services are merely adequate. In the other hands, HostGator does offer top notch web hosting services with an affordable price tags.
Here are some examples of the gaps: ValueWeb doesn’t support MySQL databases by default, while on the lowest HostGator plan (the BabyGator plan), they offer unlimited websites and unlimited databases hosting for as low as $7.95 per month, compared to ValueWeb’s $13.95 per month Starter plan.
To worsen things, asking for MySQL to be enabled (basic plan: 2 MB of data.. What the…?) would add $15 per month to your monthly bills – This is insane! Eventually, my client is happy to pay $15 a month because he is a ValueWeb customer for 10 years – So he’d expected a nice treatment by the hosting company, right? Wrong!
I set up a WordPress blog on this hosting account, and after 10 posts or so, the quota has all been used. So, the next logical step would be asking ValueWeb’s support to increase the MySQL databases disk space cap.
To cut a long story short, the staff can’t even offer an acceptable solution within 3×24 hours; It’s already been a week, and my client can’t post anything to the blog, losing visitors and traffic. Nice. He is now with HostGator and will likely to stick with it for quite a long time. Well, good for him, and (I guess) bad for ValueWeb.
So, from my client’s experience, I can draw one or two conclusions:
- Being a long time customer of a web hosting company, even a reputed one, won’t give you any perks – You are treated equally, no matter whether you are an old customer or a new one.
- Being expensive doesn’t always mean better in quality. Choose the best value for money web hosting provider that suites your web hosting needs.
All in all – Yes, I recommend HostGator over any other web hosting providers. But this is a matter of preference, really. If you are comfortable with your current web hosting providers, stick with them – If you are not anymore, seek better options.
