How To Get Cheap, Reliable & Unlimited Hosting

In the early days of the internet, hosting was a rare commodity and was limited on the whole to Universities and companies. That was a far cry from the status of hosting today where there are vast swarms of hosting companies all fighting to have their brand known and pick up the customers. Because of this fierce competition the prices of standard hosting packages have been driven down, often into single figures.

Ebay is a haven of independent hosting companies, often these are just teenagers in their bedrooms offering reseller packages they bought from ebay the previous month. Ebay is a good place to see, at a glance, the general price of hosting and a quick check shows plenty of people offering a years hosting for $10 or less, some of these are even “unlimited” packages.

“But wait-” I hear you cry, “Ebay is full of resellers selling hosting yet have no idea how it works and have never used Apache, they’re just out to make a quick buck!”. Yes, observant reader, that is the case, but it also has lots of reliable and diligent groups or individuals who have been doing this for a long time and know the ins and outs. You see, the only way to survive in the ebay hosting world is to offer your hosting as cheap as possible while offering good support and reliability in the long run. If you don’t offer it as cheap as possible, the masses will flock to the other guy. If you aren’t reliable and don’t offer support, you’ll soon see a sea of red feedback.

So your task is to identify an ebay hosting package that fills all of the categories: cheap, reliable with good customer support, and any other specifics you need, like PHP or POP3 emails. This is actually a very simple process and putting in 15 minutes worth of work for a years worth of cheap hosting is well worth the effort.

First, identify a cheap hosting package. Search for the term “cheap hosting year”, “reseller hosting year” or “unlimited hosting year”. This will throw up only the packages which are for one year and eliminates those who use the cheap price trick where they list the hosting for $7.95 but include, in very small print, somewhere at the bottom of the page “The price of this hosting is for one month only”. This is an annoying ploy, and why ebay doesn’t offer the option to search by monthly or yearly hosting I’ll never know. If you don’t get many results, search for yr instead of year and use some other terms like “reseller PHP hosting yr”, “budget unlimited hosting yr”, etc.

Once you’ve identified a few good packages it’s time to filter out the bad ones. The first and most obvious step is to simply to check the feedback of the seller. Feedback isn’t as useful as it once was, since pretty much anyone can get a few hundred positive feedback in a matter of days. All you need to do is sell 300 copies of a good eBook for $0.01 each. This is a common tactic used by power sellers and as far as I know still goes on. However, you can still use feedback to see if there are any negative comments about hosting packages. If there are more than a couple for every hundred positive feedback comments, you might want to try somewhere else. Keep in mind that even the best power sellers will have some negative feedback, it’s part and parcel of ebay, but this should highlight any blaring trends or problems with that seller at a glance. Just use your discretion.

Next step is to check out the website of the seller. 9 times out of 10 people who sell hosting on ebay will set up a website where they offer the packages to the general public at slightly higher prices. Normally you will find a link somewhere to their site, often as a demo login for cPanel (which you should also check out to get a feel of the package). If you don’t find a website link, but they supply a name for their hosting company, i.e. High-Tech Hosting, do a quick google search for that name and see if they have a site. Now, if their site looks like every other hosting site on the net, it’s probably because they’ve used a cheap or free template and simply slapped up some prices. This means they are more likely to be a reseller than an actual hosting company. Template reseller sites will usually not have forums or a live chat/help option and will have only a basic FAQ section and their contact us section, if they have one, won’t have a company address or phone number. This process will give you another good idea of which hosting packages are obviously cheap throw-away packages and which are more professional and maintained. Keep in mind however, that template reseller sites aren’t always bad and using the other two steps you should use your intuition. As an additional step you might want to check the age of the domain by going to http://www.whois.net and typing in their website. You will see how long the domain has been around and if it’s less than 6 months then this is another alarm bell.

The final step is to check what other customers had to say about the hosting. This means doing a quick Google search for the name of the hosting company plus review. In our example this would be “High-Tech Hosting review”. This will bring up a bunch of hosting review sites, which are places where people can rant and rave about hosting companies. Have a quick skim through and see what people have to say. Again, there will probably be one or two negatives for even the best of hosts, and most of the people who post reviews only do so when they’ve been pissed off by the company, but if there are any consistently negative subjects you might want to take note that, similarly if there is a sea of hatred then this host isn’t for you.

In your Google search you may also find some forum discussions and other bits and pieces related to the host. Check these out too and look for any major alarm bells. One such method I used in the past was to search Google for the eBay sellers name. I found several forum posts by that person mentioning how he was looking for ways to make money quick and was looking into selling reseller packages on eBay. To me this meant that he had no previous accountability and I decided not to buy. In a similar example I found several forum posts where the ebay seller was talking about technical information and had given answers to some web server questions. While none of this confirmed whether his hosting was a good deal, it did show that he knew his stuff and as such I bought the package.

Using Google you can find a bit of information and get a sense of the worth and reputation about the company or seller. If you can’t find anything, it means they haven’t been around for long enough and by buying you’re taking a gamble. While none of these steps are conclusive, they will give you a good idea of what you’re likely to receive, and using this method I consistently pay around the $10 mark for a years worth of unlimited hosting with no problems at all.

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