Is it time for Web Hosting regulations?

When you read this article, be aware I have no issues with small businesses or web hosts, this article is debating should web hosts actually have some form of regulation or make it more “ethical” in the larger sense- read on as I explain many problems I have experienced.

If you are an owner of a website you have likely used many “not well-known” web hosts and if you have, you likely have screwed over at one point. As you may know that if you wanted to get into the web hosting industry you could do it for, well, nothing if you actually looked around.

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Why the credit?

Credit is something I never really understood well when it comes to companies giving refunds. The main reasons for offering credit are simple – it is cheaper for them as no actual money is traded, it keeps you trapped with them as if you want to use that credit then you got to use it with them and I have to say is what is annoying.

So the other day I submitted a ticket to the former web host of Snat.co.il stating that the website was offline yet again and that I wanted to know the reason why. So after a few tickets replies debating at them, I then asked for a refund as they have been offline for quite a while and quite often.

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Host watch: TopHostingUK

Having hosted many websites in the past, I know full well what it is like hosting people data. To some it is their life, their business, their income, their eduction, their fun, their past time and so much more and it really annoys me when people run cowboy web hosts.

So this article is about the web host called “North West Web Solutions” and what seems to be directly related to them – “Top Hosting UK”. Right from the start we have a typical website written in such bad English (look on the status page). Judging from their website we also can see there is very little technical experience from anyone and every solution to their problem seems to be to get a new server which they seem to claim is better and better each time but if that is true is something I can not comment on.

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Another one bite the dusts

For my more loyal readers, you are likely aware that in the year 2008 I wrote an article called “Reasons why you shouldn’t use a free forum host” which outlined a few problems with using a free forum host. While it was not my best written work (is any ?) it did explain that if you was to use a free forum host then make sure to keep backups if you can.

A few days ago I learnt that IPBFree went off-line suddenly and so many forum administrators have now finally lost their forums and likely had no backups what so ever. Searching around, all I can see about what happened was that IPBFree was taken off-line relating to DMCA matters which does not surprise me as IPBFree was a forum service filled with warez forums.

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Unlimited hosting does not exist

Web hosting is very important if you want to get website hosting as it is this that allows people to host a website in the first place. Many years ago you were able to get a web host for about £5 a month which gave you something like 500MB of hard drive space and maybe 2GB of data transfer.

Over the years that bandwidth and hardware got cheaper and cheaper and it got to a point in which people started to offer things like 10GB hard drive space, and 100GB data transfer for around the same price of £5 a month.

However, it did not stop then. Finally, some people started to offer unlimited web hosting. Basically what this means is you can use as much data transfer as you like, and hard drive space as you like for just a low price of something like £3 a month (I am sure if you shop around, you can find it for $1.00 a year).

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