With such a low post count and refering readers to your own site to read the full article I can't help but feel that there is a rather large amount of self promotion rather than thoughts of educating this community behind your post. Sorry but thats the way I see it.
I've been programming for 21 of my 39 years and during the last 7-8 I have researched/used many hosts at all levels from shared hosting, reseller hosting, virtual dedicated/private hosting and full dedicated servers so I think I am well qualified to comment on the hosting world so I will elaborate a little on what the thread starter posted.
The single factor upon which all web hosting prices are based is bandwidth, everything else is just bells and whistles. Offers of unlimited/unmetered bandwidth should raise a red flag straightaway.
The next step down the ladder from offering unlimited hosting is overselling, it is a common practice but one thats hard to determine how much is too much.
Overselling is when a host sells more bandwidth than they have. eg, a reseller has an allotment of 50gb on their account and sell 50 packages with a 2gb limit meaning that the host should have 100gb to cover the bandwidth needs of their clients.
Most webhosting clients never come near their allotted bandwidth and this is what the host/reseller banks on. Overselling is a common practice and indeed makes economical sense but problems arise when unscrupulous hosts ridiculously oversell at cheap prices they cannot viably maintain when their clients use the bandwidth they paid for.
In the current hosting climate bandwidth usually costs around 50c per gigabyte (this is based on average server costs, support staff, power etc, of course there are exceptions (larger companies renting by the rack and mbps) but 50c is a good guesstimate for the average host). I continually see offerings of 50gb for $7.95/month, either the host is large enough to bear the brunt of the cost should you actually use that amount of bandwidth, the bandwidth is throttled so you can never actually use that much in a month or they are ridiculously overselling and praying that your sites never become busy enough to use the alloted resources.
50gb for 7.95 is just not economically viable. This is why you should research your host, (do whois lookups on their domain, how long is it registered, how long is it registered for, search google for them and see if they turn up on any hosting rating sites etc) You should get a good idea of the company size and whether they are capable of sustaining those prices.
The worst offenders of the above are what has come to be termed the "kiddie host". With the advent of control panels such as whm/cpanel, directadmin, plesk etc we have seen the emergence of the reseller. Resellers buy an allotment of bandwidth/diskspace from a host and then resell that bandwidth/space to their clients.
Some people think that using resellers is a no go but there are some great resellers out there who really look after their clients and you may even get better support than going with a larger company. (I would wager a lot of the webmasters here have reseller accounts for their clients use). The reason they have such a bad name is down to the "kiddie host" I would not just lay the blame at unscrupulous kids, there are many adults in the industry just as bad and indeed some "kids" carving a niche for themselves and successfully running a business.
The fact of the matter is reseller accounts, billing applications, and control panels enable someone to start a webhosting business for a few hundred dollars and they may have little to no knowledge of the industry or even running a business (let alone any knowledge of how to configure a webserver or solve problems caused by things such as php safe mode, suexec etc) and are just looking for a quick buck with no long term plans of sustaining the business. The webhosting industry is full of them, you can usually spot them by their keyboards, typically they have sold some of the keys to buy food and their website is littered with u instead of you.
I've often seen posts on webhostingtalk from people asking where to find a cheap dedicated server then a month later the same poster is back in the technical forum with posts such as help, apache has stopped and I cant get it going again, my customers are going mad, please help, or the typical I've been hacked post from the ones who rent dedicated servers and dont disable root logins and leave the password as the generic one issued by the datacenter.
Another factor comes into play with resellers. Success. Have they planned for it? are they knowledgable enough to go it alone? I've seen hosts startup and be successful as resellers but when they get to the point that they have to start hiring their own servers everything falls apart because they are not knowledgagle enough to secure/configure/maintain their own servers and the price of managed servers is not covered by their current pricing schemes.
So how do you stop yourself from ending up in the clutches of a dud host?
1. If the cost per gigabyte of bandwidth is less than 50c they are usually overselling, remember though that reselling to a certain degree is standard practice. 20gb for 7.95/month - ok, but not 100gb for 12.95.
2. If it looks to good to be true then it usually is.
3. Research your host carefully before even contacting them, read and reread their terms of service and acceptable usage policy. Watch for possible get out clauses should you use all your alloted resources.
4. Forget everything else offered, dont be swayed by anything other than the price per gb of bandwidth everything else should come as standard.
5. Ask lots of questions, even ask the odd stupid one to irritate them. Do they appear knowledgable? do they answer the quesions to your satisfaction? do they evade complicated ones? Do they maintain a polite business tone even when answering your stupid questions?
6. The bigger companies are usually more expensive but they are successful because their pricing model allows enough to pay the costs incurred.
If you want excellent uptime and knowledgable/timely support then don't expect to get a month of it for the price of a sandwich. Don't go bargain hunting when it comes to hosting your site.
Now before anyone jumps down my throat over the 50c per gb bandwidth let me say that that is based on 500gb of bandwidth on a managed server from some of the main datacenters which run around $250/month which lays the base cost at 50c. I know that you can get 1tb on some servers for around 200/month and even 100/month on unmanaged boxes but I've based the price on the average webhost renting 3-7 managed servers also consider profit, they are not selling at base cost.
If you read all through that then I hope it has been a little enlightening rather than a rant at the industry. :)
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