When you are a customer of a web hosting company, there are certain rights that you have. You shouldn’t stand for being pushed around just because the hosting company can’t handle the problems that you have. That is what they are getting paid for, and they are going to have to deal with their customers’ problems one way or another in order to stay in business. If you are paying for a service, make sure that you are not letting yourself get ripped off when it comes to customer service.
A common mistake that webmasters constantly seem to put up with for too long is just bad service in general. No, we are not talking about customer service or dealing with tech support, we are dealing with the actual server reliability in itself. As a paying customer, you are entitled to use a server that actually works. In no place during the sign-up process does it say that you have to deal with constant server outages, slow speed, and poor interfaces. If it is your first time dealing with a web host and you are experiencing these problems, get the heck out of there!
Another thing that commonly goes unrecognized is the ability to access your data in a reasonable amount of time, no matter what sort of server problems they are experiencing or violations to their TOS agreement they have claimed you have done. No matter how bad of a day their having with either you or their own equipment, there is no excuse for them not being able to submit to you your website’s code and database entries in one form or another. Yeah, everybody has their off-days, but you shouldn’t have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost data and scripting because of it. Web hosting companies know this and if they feel threatened enough legally, they will eventually find a way to surrender your property back to you.
One last thing that no customer should have to put up with is a web host that doesn’t let you leave them in peace. For instance, some web hosts will try and constantly nag you to stay with them and offer some sort of deal that they only offer to their angry customers. Sometimes these deals come in the forms of free trials, for instance, they will continue your e-mail service for free for a few months and start to charge you eventually for it.
Practices like these are more likely to take place while using a company that doesn’t have much of a popular brand name. It’s important to research these types of things before selecting your web host. Everybody is entitled to make a mistake here and there; they shouldn’t be judged based on just that. They should be judged on the ability to deal with the problems that arise.