Cheap StudentWebHosting Leads To Tears

Whether you are trying to make a living on the internet, blogging about your favorite sports team or movie star, you should choose your hosting company and domain registrar carefully.

I had a site and a domain name hosted with a UK company called StudentWebHosting.co.uk and I found out to my cost what all the experts tell you is true, never host your site with the company who registered your domain.

At first it seemed a good deal, a free domain for the first year (some even offer the free domain for life) and £50 for the hosting.

The trouble starts though when you start to realize its run as a part time business. One day you find your site is down, you submit a support ticket and then wait, and wait, and wait. Finally the response comes but there is no apology for being late etc. They act like a response rate of several days is the norm for the industry.

You put up with this for several years but other sites and domains you registar are with other companies. You start to realize the service is shocking compared to established companies in America and you decide enough is enough.

With your experience tucked under your belt you purchase some hosting with a quality company like
WebHostingBuzz and you transfer the domain to your regular registrar such as Namecheap.com.

Now your problems really begin! You see, a company like StudentWebhosting know that you cannot transfer a domain unless they give you what's known as an EPP code.

Guess what they do? They stall and stall and come up with lame excuses and say all kinds of crazy stuff. Anything they can say that stalls the transfer in the hope that you either give in and stay with them or that they stall you long enough that another yearly payment becomes due and you have to pay to get the release.

That's not the only problem you will have with these small hosting reseller packages aimed at Student web hosting either. I checked one of my sites one day to find a message saying "Monthly Bandwidth Exceeded, Contact Billing."

Well I tried to contact billing, support, and everyone else with no luck. I was finally contacted a full 2 weeks later and the trouble was, even though the domain was registered with Namecheap and not StudentWebHosting, I still couldn't move the site to another host because I couldn't log in to the FTP account to download the site because of the bandwidth access.

If you are new to websites and looking for a cheap deal or perhaps you are considering StudentWebHosting and did a search for a review, do yourself a favor and first off:

Registar your domain with a specialist registrar such as Namecheap or GoDaddy

And then choose a hosting company that:

Offers 24 hour support.

Online upgrades so that should your site suddenly start getting a surge in traffic you can buy extra bandwidth online.

A forum so that you can check out what there customers are saying about them.

I've tried and use several hosting accounts and have found that at less than an hour WebHostingBuzz to be the quickest to reply and great value for money, but whether you use WebHostingBuzz or one of the other smaller hosting companies out there, DON'T TAKE THEM UP ON THEIR FREE DOMAIN NAME OFFER!