Hosting Struggle – Round 1
As a bootstrapped company every cent is valuable for us, so we always look to reduce our costs and expenses. Because of the limited budget, we decided to make one week test on a free hosting service, thus lowering the costs for web hosting at the start.
Usually free web hosting is not always as reliable and secure as it’s presented, however we decided to give it a try. There are a lot of hosting companies that offer absolutely free hosting like www.000webhost.com, www.weebly.com, www.webs.com, etc. with limited resources. We chose 000webhost.com because it offers 1500 MB disk space, 100 GB monthly transfer, your own domain name, and support for PHP and MySQL. It seemed more than enough for start.
This is great deal for all start-up companies, actually who wouldn’t like an offer like this? So we signed up and uploaded our early marketing site and blog, but after a while we noticed that invoicebus.com is not accessible for a short period of the day, and this was happening almost every day. Their site says they have 99% uptime which is not very convenient for serious web hosting. If we have 30 days every month with simple math we get 7.2 hours downtime every month (30 days * 24 hours = 720 hours a month; 1% of 720 is 7.2) so on a yearly basis you get more then 80 hours of downtime. This was unacceptable for us, even for our early marketing site, and from this experience we decided that we can’t host our site on another free web hosting, so started searching alternative paid hosting providers, with reliability in mind.
There are a lot of hosting companies so choosing the right one is not very straightforward process. We started reading various reviews for hosting companies, and in most reviews we saw the same hosting companies. What caught our eyes was a hosting company named Fatcow founed in 1998, which servers and offices are powered with 100% wind energy.
They are specialized for hosting personal and small business sites, and offer one unlimited plan, with unlimited disk space, bandwidth, domains, mail accounts, MySQL databases, and plenty of other stuff. For all the things you get, the price is quite decent, with discount for the first year. One of the greatest thing about them is their rock solid support team with quick and friendly responses.
What we really like about them was the fact that they don’t offer many confusing hosting plans, but "One Fat Account", so we picked them. Another thing that we like is their highly clear and very intuitive control panel vDeck. Also we insist on hosting provider with secure data centers located in the United States. So far we are very pleased with their service and support, we’ve never experienced downtime, or any other interruption about our site and we highly recommend them for simple web hosting.
We definitely are planning dedicated hosting account for our invoicing web application, with much better performances. We are considering taking scalable cloud hosting account but at this time we are still working on the details about that.
The lesson we learned in the past period is that if you want to have a good business start you have to spend a couple of bucks, so don’t hesitate about money when it comes to quality web hosting.
Hosting struggle – round 1 over: 1:0 for Invoicebus
Invoicebus Team
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