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I’ve started getting notices from my web site hosting company about overusage of disk space along with other types of notices. My site is pretty small and I noticed it has gotten really slow lately too. I’m currently paying $15 a month for my hosting plan. How do I know if I’m being ripped off by my hosting company? I’m thinking I may need to make a change soon. Any help would be appreciated.
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Hi Amanda,
For $15/month, I do not think you are being ripped off. I’ve seen cheaper “value hosting” plans — of course. But $15 is relatively inexpensive.
The real issue is what kind of “overusage” charges you are getting hit with. I am going to take a guess and suggest you might have a lot of large files hosted — maybe you can eliminate some.
For instance, do you have large video files on your server? If so, you may be able to upload them to YouTube and embed the YouTube player instead of hosting your own videos. You might also check your email inbox — are you keeping copies of all your emails in your Webmail inbox? I did that once by mistake for 6 months, and I was amazed how fast it added up.
As far as the website slowness, that could be due to a lot of factors, including the code on your site and whether pages have multiple large images, whether you are using multiple outside services, etc. Contact your Web developer or customer support at your hosting company and see what they suggest.
If you had advanced knowledge, I’d suggest the YSlow add-on tool for Firefox to also help pinpoint the cause of the slowness: http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
Hope this helps,
Anita
Yep, your’e in need of a new host. Whats likely happened is that your “host” is actually a reseller, it sounds like, and not hosting everything directly themselves. It’s hard o tell them apart nowadays, UNTIL you’re site starts getting REALLY slow when you have a small site. Best thing, is to look for hosting companies with good reputations thru other companies that are happy with their services. Try looking your’e current company up thru Networksolutions or WHOIS. Hope that helps!
Your host should have some sort of statistics program that lets you see how much disk space and bandwidth you are using, among other things. You should be able to easily verify what they are telling you and then maybe figure out where to cut back some of the files you are storing.
If you need the space you are using, you could obviously pay for more space by upgrading your plan or seeing if you can just get more disk space added to your current plan. If you are truly unhappy with the service, then looking for a new one is a good idea. A good place to spend some time reviewing hosts is http://www.webhostingtalk.com/, which has a ton of forum posts similar to yours. There is a lot of helpful information about hosts and a lot of really helpful forum members who can give you a ton of advice.
Good luck!