2004, John Calder
http://www.TheEzine.net
In recent many years, the hosting business has become extremely competitive. Not so long ago, the monthly price for an average hosting account for one domain was in the $35 and up range, at a minimum. Now, you may get a hosting account where you may host unlimited domains (up to the disk space and network usage limits of your account), for $25 and under. To try to win more customers in this crowded field, most hosting companies offer bundles of features, included at no extra charge in your hosting plan.
On the surface, all of those features look sizeably workable, and they are. From single autoresponders to shopping carts, from private name servers to the amazing Fantastico package that lets you install any of numerous software packages, like blogs, content management systems, forums, help desks, and so on, with near one-click ease. But theres a hidden, more self-serving reason the hosting companies offer this convenience to their customers. They hope you will
become dependent enough on the software features they offer that it will discourage you from changing hosting businesses
.
Their accomadation
might
suffer at some point, perhaps due to sale of the business
, support staff cutbacks, problems within their network, and a variety of other reasons. You might
want to change hosting businesses
for sizeably successful
reason. But if youve set up your entire site using the software your hosting company offers, you wont necessarily be able to take those software packages with you. You may most definately
find another hosting business
that offers the identical
software, but you will
still have to transfer all of your databases and configuration settings yourself.
One way to help eliminate this problem is to make use of
third-party services where you might
- for example, autoresponder services and visitor tracking are nice
candidates. Your next best choice is to install your own free of price
or paid scripts, that you might
delete and reinstall on another server, should a move be necessary.
