Anyone who has ever run a website that wasn’t hosted on Geocities or Angelfire knows that you get what you pay for most of the time. This is understandable, but the problem comes in when you “pay” for having chosen the wrong web hosting service. It’s easy enough to do and we all make mistakes, so don’t punish yourself too heavily if you discover your web host isn’t quite the outstanding business they claim to be.

The listings below are the most common aspects that should be taken note of, and which may serve evidences that your current web host provider is trying to hide something that is not really legal. Why only six? Because, from the moment you learn that your host is not really that credible enough, or not legally existing, you may burse into rage like you’re in the middle of digital hell, hence, 6 is the number of the devil.

6) Learning to Share – When you sign up for web hosting you’ll often be offered a lower cost alternative to renting your own web server that is usually called ‘shared hosting’. This can be an excellent way to reduce your costs when your site is young, or if you are not using heavy bandwidth and server space. Shared hosting is defined as a server that hosts multiple accounts. All of the websites each appear on the web just as they would with a unique server, nothing weird about it.

Shared hosting does not mean that you “share” the time your website is up with other accounts on the shared server. When your host tries to tell you that each account on the shared server gets equal time being live on the web, it’s time to move on. This is not a round robin system of web hosting and you shouldn’t have to “take your turn” having your site be accessible from the internet.

5) Outsourcing: Extreme English – In today’s global economy, many companies choose to outsource labor to areas of the world where the cost of living is far lower than that of developing nations. This means that they get to pay their employees less and still get that bubbly, tingly, and happy feeling that they are still “helping” the less fortunate.

Sometimes, we may receive responses from the company technical or customer service representatives that are poorly written in the language. This holds to be true even for the native speakers and to those who were born in an English speaking country. We just try to decipher of its meaning and just make sense out of it.

In most cases of probability, we often get e-mails, notices, letters from the respective personnel of the hosting company either in billing or collections, customer support, or technical support wherein such e-mail or notice have been poorly written. We don’t really want to receive such notifications that we barely could understand, those which are seemingly translated from an internet site or program that does not give importance to its grammatical correctness. As a client, you have to be accorded of quality service at all times most especially when you are requesting for aid and assistance.

Surely, you would feel dismayed whenever you are receiving such poor communication material from the web host company that you are dealing with. It might also suggest that you may already consider the thought of leaving or having a new provider.

4) Your Web Host Goes REALLY Green – While the global movement to reduce carbon footprints and conserve energy in an effort to salvage the environment is certainly a good one, certain individuals may take the concept a bit too far. Plenty of hosting companies are “going green”, among them some of the most reputable in the business, but like any concept there are those who will get squirrelly and try to leverage the charitable idea for their own ends.

Should you receive an e-mail from your web hosting company informing you that they are reducing carbon emissions by cutting uptime from 99% to 62.7%, you have a right to be alarmed. Reducing energy usage is great, but it requires fair play here. No matter what they tell you, your website is not depleting the ozone layer nor is it contributing to global warming by being available to your customers 24 hours a day.

You should always be on the watch for any of these web hosting companies for your online business not to end up suddenly with losses.

3) You Have Seen the Picture of Your Hosting Company’s President on the Wanted List – Concerning the need of gathering information regarding your current web hosting provider, you might as well want to search his profile over the internet. It’s free to check on the character of your host president over the internet especially on Google. It’s free to browse unto this site and would prove to be very much beneficial especially to take note of that person whom you’re going to be dealing with. A lot of people now are relying on personal checks on Google.

When you put the president of your hosting company’s name into Google and the top result is an entry on The Smoking Gun, you may have a problem on your hands. Don’t be fooled, money laundering is not about sanitizing cash. Pyramid schemes are not rare, historic, architectural blueprints. Racketeering is not a sport. Extortion has nothing to do with being able to twist your body into unique shapes. Pay attention to who you do business with because a lower price is not always the best way to go, especially if you’re paying into the pockets of the same guy you saw as an “artist’s rendering” on a flier at the Post Office.

2) Common Requests – In any kind of business endeavor, the relationship between the provider or seller and the customer or client can be pretty much intimate. This might be attributed to the fact that we would like to communicate with the company in much nicer way. Notwithstanding this objective, we should always keep our business relationship with the hosting company at a purely professional level. The reviews that the company might get from the customers might be a relevant reason enough; it should not escalate to the point where the host already asks for special or out of the business favors from the client.

In the event that your web hosting providers e-mails you a lengthy, ornate letter requesting you intervene in family matters, stay skeptical. Just because their terminally ill uncle who happens to be a wealthy political official in Nigeria has told them he will give you a cut of the several million dollars he needs wired to your bank account, does not mean this is true. In fact, obliging this particular request may result in federal interest in your financial activities. Even though you may have the best of intentions, it’s better not to bail out individuals in little known countries whom you don’t have a personal relationship. After all, oil tycoons rarely ask for the assistance of unknown parties when they need to convert their local currency into dollars.

1) Management of Your Web Host Has Been Bought by “Family” – Like any business, web hosting firms are sometimes bought out by competitors or simply change hands for any number of reasons. This is nothing to be unduly alarmed by, but stay alert to potential changes in your terms of service and in the performance of your hosting itself. You may find that the new management isn’t quite the type of people you want to continue doing business with.

Definitely certain changes on the business procedures could be expected in such cases like requests of the company for you to send out checks in a new name and address. Thus, when you are billed by a certain Uncle Sam but the host insists of putting Joe Black on the check, then there’s really a suspicious problem somewhere else. You should always watch out for those anomalous business dealings as much as possible.

Always be careful as to whom you are dealing with. Most of the web host providers are on the positive side, but there are still rotten ones that are present. Please make sure that you are financially cleared of your obligations with that company before running away.

You don’t probably want to have problems especially with an illegitimate company.

And you certainly don’t want to find out how he got his nickname.

Laurence Flynn is the CEO of HostNexus, a web hosting company celebrating almost 10 years in the industry. HostNexus is a leading provider of Linux Hosting and reliable Windows Hosting. Find out why thousands of webmasters switch to HostNexus every year. Check out HostNexus today!