Why You Need to Read Web Hosting Terms and Conditions!
All right people, we need to honest here. Most of us don’t even read any terms and conditions of any software or service we sign up for, and those who say they do are clearly lying. After all, who has time to go through pages of boring legal text, right?
But this attitude might end up getting you in some sort of trouble, and I am sure that is something that you do not want at all. In the life of a webmaster, we sign up for all kinds of services online and almost all services we sign up for have these terms and conditions and we hardly go through any of them.
I know a person who signed up for this hosting company and bought some plans there. Due to some problems, he had a big data loss. His content was all lost and the hosting provider said they couldn’t do anything. No compensation was provided because it was mentioned in the terms and conditions. Therefore, my friend not only lost some revenue, but more importantly, he also lost his data which is even more precious.
In this post we will be talking about the reasons why you need to read the terms and conditions while choosing a web host. Let’s start.
You as a customer = $$$ for Companies!
Let’s face it guys. No matter how much these companies present themselves, and no matter how many campaigns they run in order to show they are the good guys, its a different story.
These companies are full fledged businesses and they are designed to make a profit. There might be clauses that could prevent you from being compensated for a variety of different situations. To make sure you are dealing with a fair company, you will want to be sure to read web hosting terms and conditions before you decide.
Read Web Hosting Terms and Conditions
There might be some hidden fees. This is another reason why you need to read web hosting terms and conditions before signing up. A lot of companies don’t mention some fees that they charge by default, and these charges are hidden in the terms and conditions which we blindly agree to. You might end up paying a hefty amount instead of the amount you thought you were paying and that would suck, wouldn’t it?
Unmetered != Unlimited
Many companies like to mention the product specs as Unmetered. For example, you will find that many hosting companies provide Unmetered Bandwidth and people confuse it with unlimited.
Unmetered is a term that companies use when they don’t monitor the amount of bandwidth you are using. But that doesn’t mean you have unlimited juice. Sometimes there might be a total of 500TB transfer for all accounts on a server and that server holds many websites at once and this 500TB is shared by all these websites. Now, if a website uses up all the bandwidth, you won’t be able to claim losses.
These types of things are usually mentioned in terms and conditions, and not in the product pages. Therefore, be sure to check before choosing a web host.
What are something you, as a customer should check for?
We as customers are the main factor these companies exist and we have the power to choose which company and product we want to use and hence we will have to take steps on our own to prevent any bad experience from happening.
Here are a few things you can do:
- Read web hosting terms and conditions. Read the full terms and conditions. Do not skip any page or sentence.
- Look for, and inquire about, any hidden fees or extra fees there might be from the billing support team using the live chat option.
- Inquire about backups, and if they have any charges to restore the backups, in case something goes wrong. Most good companies won’t charge anything.
- Many companies mention free website migration but they limit it to just 1-2 websites and if you have more than those number of websites on your old server, then it would be hectic to bring them to the new one yourself and if you would like the new company to do it for you, they would charge you certain amounts.
- You should also check for the maximum number of files you have on your server else you will run out of inodes.
- Make sure you have enough CPU resources and other critical resources like RAM etc. as well.
This was a post in which we mentioned why it is important for you to read web hosting terms and conditions when you are choosing a web host. If you have any suggestions, doubts or any questions, you can get them cleared in the comments section below. We are eager to hear from you!
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