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Written by Henri Straforelli, Owner of ET Web Hosting
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If you’ve visited more then one or two web hosting company websites, then by now you’ll have noticed they all make the same claims and promises:

99.9% uptime!        24x7 support!       Multiple network connections!       Wow!

So if every company is pretty much advertising the same thing… then what's the difference? Why not just pick the cheapest company who is willing to give you the most disk space and bandwidth? Good question!

Hello, my name is Henri Straforelli and I am the owner of ET Web Hosting. I have created this page because I wanted to try and explain why ET Web Hosting is different then “all the others”, why we're a bit more expensive, and why you should choose us as your web and email hosting provider. Please feel free to if you have any comments or thoughts about this page – my door is always open and I'd love to hear from you.

Not all hosting companies are equal – what is important to you?

So how do you find the “right” hosting company for your needs? First, you must determine what is important to you and your business:

• Reliability. Do you care if your website and email is available at all times? Or is the occasional "downtime" acceptable? If your website is a sales tool and email is your customer connection - how will it reflect on your business if they are not available? If your phone service went down for a few hours without notice.. would you consider that acceptable or would you prefer a higher degree of reliability?
• Communication. If (when) your website or email is down, do you want to know what's going on? Do you want to know right away if the problem has been acknowledged by the technicians and what they're doing to fix it?
• Understandable Support. Is friendly and easy to understand support something you appreciate? If you need help with something (maybe setting up an email address, or trying to understand how or why something works, etc..) do you want a cryptic “geek-speak” answer or do you want the support person to spend a few extra minutes and take the time to really explain things so you fully understand?
• "Always on" Customer Service. How about the ability to communicate with someone RIGHT NOW!? Do you want an actual voice you can talk with to find out more information? What if you need help at 3:00 in the morning? Can you afford to wait until maybe the next day or perhaps even a few days before hearing back from the support folks?
• Honesty and Integrity. Do you place value on a company who is “up front” about how they operate? Do you prefer to trust your website and email to a company who is willing to stand behind their service and support with a real Service Level Agreement and money back guarantee?

These are just a few of the key considerations you will use when deciding what company will provide the website and email services for your business. It's an important decision!

But every company makes the same claims you just outlined above – so why are some cheaper then others?

I hate to do this, but the only way to answer this question is with an honest explanation of the various costs involved with web hosting and how those costs are then passed to you, the customer. Don't worry, there is a point to all this.. and when you get to the end of this article you will understand why our plans are a little more expensive and hopefully you'll decide to trust us with your business.

The costs of a hosting company

hardware

Hardware is a commodity these days. This means that, despite the hype, there really isn’t much of a difference between all the different types of modern servers. Some might be “Dell”, or “IBM”, or “quad core”, or “ECC memory”, or “insert latest techno-babble here”…. essentially they are all high-performance machines capable of providing reliable service. (Please notice that I said “capable of providing reliable service...” and did not say “will provide reliable service”. This will make sense when I talk about "overselling" below.)

Note: It is entirely possible that some hosting companies might literally be using the same physical computer hardware as another company. You’ll see why when I talk about web hosting "resellers" later.

I'm not saying that all hardware is equal. What I’m saying is that the actual costs involved with hardware are not a very big percentage of the total costs in the operation and management of a solid and reliable web hosting company. For example, the difference in our cost between a budget Pentium 4 3ghz server and a premium Pentium dual-Xeon 3ghz server is only around $100 per month!

Stay with me here... Since I'm trying to explain why some hosting companies are “cheaper” then others, I am first trying to show where the major differences in cost can be found, so I can then later explain why it matters to you.

people

This is where hosting companies are very different from each other. "People" are the biggest portion of the total costs required to operate a good hosting company.

The vast majority of web hosting companies are are actually just one-or-two person “owner operated”. They are known as resellers, because they "resell" the services provided by another company. (More info on reselling here.) Many such companies are even run by folks who figure they can get a reseller account, charge super-low prices, attract tons of customers, and get rich quick! With a simple reseller hosting plan, it is possible for anyone to have their own hosting company. They just need to put up their own website and advertise the standard "99.9% uptime!" and "24x7 support!" claims you see everywhere. The pricing they charge may not be grounded in reality, and that's what I'm trying to explain here.

**Note: Not ALL reseller "companies" are bad. Some resellers are actually a very good deal because they may add "value-added" services to the web hosting you buy from them, such as extremely personal or accessible service/support, etc.

Most of these "get rich quick" reseller companies are very difficult to spot. Remember that just because they have a nice website and make amazing claims about what they offer doesn’t mean they are telling the truth or can actually provide what they claim.. at the price they offer. If they purchase their reseller plan from a reputable company, then you might not even find out they are a reseller until your website or email stops working and you need to contact them for help. You might then discover they don’t know how to do something technical, or that they don’t know why your website/email is down, etc. This is because they must first go to their “parent” company and seek help. Generally, the better the “parent” company - the better the reseller’s service to you.

Any “real” hosting company must hire people to manage and maintain the various aspects of the business in order to guarantee that all the various claims and benefits advertised can actually and truthfully be met. We must pay for people to manage and look after the hardware, software, helpdesk, accounting, and all the many little details that drive me crazy and keep everything running smoothly all day of every day.

I would like to now draw your attention to what is important for your hosting needs. If true 24x7 support, highly reliable services, and direct/quick communication are not important for you, then you may be happy choosing a good-quality reseller as your provider. However, keep in mind that no matter what a one or two person “company” claims, if they’re out shopping or perhaps in the bathroom, then they are not available to monitor your website and email or reply to your request for help. They won’t be able to provide quick communication about a problem. They won’t even be able to touch the physical hardware (like hit reboot) since they don’t have physical access to it.

OK, now's here's my point:

The simple fact is that it costs a lot of money to truthfully and honestly guarantee the big claims of support and reliability made on our website. Good people cost a lot of money.

The total monthly "people" costs for the operation of a web hosting company can be quite varied. Costs can range from free (ie: a reseller who does not consider getting paid for their own time and only needs to recoup hardware costs) to thousands of dollars for a team of highly skilled professionals capable of providing true 24x7 customer support and highly reliable server management.

I hope you're still reading and that things make sense so far. I'm just about ready to introduce you to the interesting stuff. :)

So how does a hosting company “get back” their costs? How do they make a profit?

OK, at this point you know more about the huge costs it takes to truthfully and absolutely deliver the huge promises of reliability, uptime, fast support, etc.  By now you might be thinking about all the various hosting plans you’ve seen on different websites and wondering how any company can charge so little when the costs are so high. How can a company charge only $1 a month for hosting if the actual costs to provide it reliably are in the thousands!? Even $10 per month doesn't come close to covering it!

I will now explain how every hosting company in the world creates their pricing strategy and actually tries to makes money. There are two concepts to understand:

• Shared hosting
• Overselling

You can read more about shared hosting, but basically it is the "splitting up" of the hosting company's costs between many customers on the same server. Since most customer websites only need a small portion of a server's total power, the company places many websites on each server and then all the websites on that computer share the costs - making it cheaper for everyone.

Overselling is an "operational decision" used by many companies to cut costs and try to squeeze out more profit from each web server. It is when the company sells more resources then the server actually has available to share. For example, a company might put 500 customer websites on each server when the server is really only designed to handle 200 active websites. If even half of the 500 websites started getting more visitors and became more busy, then the server would not have enough processing power to handle the demand. The server will become slow and unstable, and possibly even crash. Then every website on the server (including yours) will be adversely affected!

Overselling is dangerous! Maybe this has already happened to you? If your website started out great, and over time it periodically "goes down" or your email has begun having lots of reliability problems, then it's likely your web host has "oversold" their server in an attempt to make more money from it. In fact, if your hosting account is on a shared server that is being oversold, then your website and email will eventually die because the server will become more and more unstable over time as other customer's websites on the server become more busy and use up all the available power. Is that an acceptable risk for your business?

It is possible to oversell just about everything. And most hosting companies do! They oversell disk space, CPU power, bandwidth, and even customer service and support. For example, if a company has only one support person available at any given time and 10 customers need help, then the last customer who contacts them certainly isn't going to have very fast support. (Can you say, "Please wait?") If that company advertises 24x7 support and isn't charging enough to realistically and honestly cover their expenses without resorting to massive overselling, then you are risking your website and email.

How would you feel if your website and email went down as a result of your shared server being too oversold?

If overselling is so dangerous for the customer, then why do hosting companies do it?

1) They must do it just to survive! Some hosting companies think they can only compete on price and that they must always be cheaper and offer more diskspace/bandwidth then "the other guy". This is a bad situation, because in order to even stay in business these companies must make enough money per server to cover their basic costs.. so they are either lying with their advertising or they are massively overselling and will not be in business for long once their servers start to crash and their customers move to a more reliable provider (who charges more realistic pricing).

The fact is that it just is not possible to reliably provide the huge disk space and bandwidth hosting plans you see at such low cost, unless the company is massively overselling. But overselling will eventually lead to an unstable server, which is a disaster waiting to happen for your website and email. Not good!

These companies take advantage of new customers who don't understand how web hosting really works. Most "inexperienced" customers are more attracted to hosting plans that advertise lots and lots of disk space and bandwidth and are super cheap. These customers don't understand the reality about overselling and its dangers for their website and email, so they just pick the hosting plan that gives them "more for less" from a popular company or one with a nice website. It usually only take a few months before these "inexperienced" customers turn into experienced customers and go shopping for a better and more reliable provider. If that describes you, then feel free to check out our web hosting refugee special offer.

I should point out here that all very large hosting companies also use overselling as a business strategy. So how do they stay in business? Simple - they have MASSIVE advertising budgets and they have MASSIVE customer turnover. It's a numbers game for them, based on a constant volume of new customers. These types of hosting companies are fine for hobby websites that don't need a high degree of reliability or personal service/support, but are not good for a business website or email where reliability and good service/support is critical.

2) Greed! (I am being very honest with you right now.) Some web hosting companies purposely oversell their servers because they simply want to squeeze out more money from them. Once enough customers are placed on a server to cover the "basic costs" and make a bit of profit.. some hosts continue to load more customers because they simply want to make more profit and they don't really care about things like high reliablity.

So how is ET Web Hosting different?

I have committed ET Web Hosting to NOT overloading (overselling) our shared servers with too many customers. At ET Web Hosting, profit takes a backseat to reliability.

As a result, our prices are NOT the cheapest.

Our hosting plans are a bit more expensive because then we don't need to overload our servers with customers to make a reasonable profit. You are NOT just buying "yyy" gigs of diskspace and "zzz" gigs of bandwidth. You are buying the confidence and knowledge that your website is located on a computer with plenty of available resources and is not about to crash because we need to suck every last drop of money out of it by massively overselling, just to pay our expenses...

At ET Web Hosting, we provide truly reliable web and email hosting service and real 24x7 support, at a realistic pricing point, built around solid and honest principles of business.

ET Web Hosting - Why risk your business with anyone else?