One of the most critical components component of your success on the internet is your web-host. If your web-host keeps giving you troubles, you will not be able to concentrate on developing, promoting and monetizing your websites. Also, if your website is down, you will not be able to show any ads and that would translate into zero revenue for you.

Sure — you can go with the top-of-shelf hosts which provide 100% uptime but they cost an arm and leg. Since our objective is to keep our costs minimum, we are going to use cheap shared-hosts. However, a LOT of these cheap hosts often resort of tactics — which I call “Dirty Games” — to squeeze every bit of profit from their customers.

Read this post to find out how most of these hosts try to rip-off their customers and “Rules of Thumb’ for identifying and avoiding such hosts. And yes, I will have host recommendations from my personal experience with some companies. Let’s get down to business, shall we?

With the advent of cut-throat competition in the hosting market, a lot of hosts have taken to making false and misleading statements to lure those new to the industry and then use “dirty-tacts” to squeeze every bit of profit out of them. Here are Five Worst Dirty-Tactics.

#1 - Long Lock-In Periods - See those ultra-cheap $3 or $4 a month prices? Most of the times they are valid only if you prepay for a year or two. What this means is that you are going to be stuck with this host for next year or two.

Yes, what this means is that it doesn’t matter how bad the quality of service after the 30 days trial period, you are neither getting a refund nor you have an exit strategy. And let me tell you from my own personal experience, even the poster-boys of the industry go bad.

A few years ago I used to have a website hosted with Site5. At that time they used to be a rock-solid host and everyone used to swear by their quality of service. And then within a few months the quality of service turned into one of the worst in the industry.

Perhaps they were victims of their own success and grew much faster than they could manage. They are still in business but I don’t hear much about them these days. However, the point is not that. The point is that people who had prepaid them for two years had to stick with them and suffer through the bad quality of service.

Some hosts use tactics like introducing setup fees to motivate people to pay for longer period. If a host has a setup fee — avoid them. Back in 1998-99, setting up an account used to be a manual thing. However, today, when most of the stuff is automated, charging a setup fees is just a scheme to get you to pay for a longer contract.

#2 - Unreasonable Restrictions - A lot of these hosts put unreasonable restrictions on their users. These may include a restriction on number of domains, daily bandwidth limit, maximum file size limit, database size limit, not being able to use certain popular scripts etc.

One very popular host doesn’t allow its customers to use FTP Software but rather forces them to use an online interface — what a pain in ass if you have to upload hundreds of files — like when you are installing wordpress.

The very same host also has a file size limit of a few kb and a database size of just 10 MB — even though they are giving their customers hundreds of GBs of diskspace and thousands of GBs of bandwidth. Try filling up those spaces in a few lifetimes if you can.

Another host claims to give 3000 GB of bandwidth a month — however they have a daily cap of 10 GB. This means that no matter what, you cannot use more than 300 GB a month of bandwidth.

And there are so many other hosts which do these type of things.

Now mind you, we want to host all of our domains on just one account — using addon domains facility which I will explain it at later in post. If you end up with a host with such crazy restrictions, you are basically in big trouble.

#3 - Super-Sneaky Contracts - Let’s not even get started on the fine-print they have in their contacts. Basically what it usually says is that if you site starts to get popular, we will kick you out unless you upgrade to our more-expensive plan.

Want to know another super-sneaky clause most of these cheapo hosts have? Even though you are given a 30 day money-back period, but, if you ask for the money back, you have to pay setup costs which are usually about $30. Pretty high considering annual fees of most of these hosts is like 80 or 90 bucks!

#4 - Low Quality Infrastructure. One of the reasons why these hosts are able to offer services at such low prices and still be in business is because they do ruthless cost-cutting.

Usually this cost cutting involves using low-quality server infrastructure and using low-quality networks. This usually translates in low-reliability and quality of services being delivered.

Another department which suffers is customer-service. Since highly skilled technical staff costs money, so they are out of question. These hosts usually outsource their support to third-world countries and hire bare-minimum skilled staff. Result - lower quality of support for their customers.

#5 - Hidden Costs - What most people don’t realize when they are paying for the super-cheap hosting package is even though that they are getting a package with “more than you can ever use” bandwidth and space, the power-features missing.

God forbid, if your site ever becomes famous — which it will if you keep following my strategies — you are in for a shock!

I have seen some hosts charging $15 per GB of bandwidth over usage (yeah right!), $10 a month for SSL Certificate (needed for eCommerce) and $8 a month for ever add-on domain.

Now you have to remember that for these hosts, it is simply a numbers game. If you get dissatisfied and move on, it would hardly make a dent to their figure of hundreds of thousands of customers.

However, for you, it will mean a lot of wasted time, effort and money. Let’s see how to find the right host.

Am I saying that all cheap hosts are bad and should be avoided? Absolutely Not. I have used them for a long time before moving to VPSes. However, I do have a big problem with those super-cheap hosts who will go any extent to lure new customers and keep them locked in — by hook or my crook.

Here are some things you should remember when choosing a web-host. They will save you a lot of hassles and headaches in long run.

Rule#1 - No Lock-In. I would strongly recommend against paying anything more than a month in advance and, if you have to, a maximum of three months.

Sure, you may pay a bit higher price by paying monthly than you’d if you pay yearly. However, think of it as your “host-reliability” insurance — in case their services start to deteriorate, you will have an option of moving to another host.

Rule #2 - Know the Restrictions. It is an excellent idea to clear-up any special restrictions that the web host may have before you sign-up with them. Nasty surprises are particularly bad if they affect you monetarily.

And when you ask them about this, be specific in your questions. Ask them the database size limit, file-size limit, if they have any cap-on daily bandwidth usage and any particular script they disallow.

Do remember that nearly every host disallows extremely server intensive scripts like chat-scripts on shared infrastructure. You should be concerned only if they disallow popular scripts like vBulletin, PhotoPost and other which you may use.

Rule #3 - Know Thy Contract. Read the terms of service and acceptable use policy carefully before you sign-up with the webhost. Don’t just skim through it considering it to be regular stuff — more than often it is not and it directly affects you.

Rule #4 - Clarify Prices. Make sure that you always clarify the pricing of various add-ons before you hit the sign-up button. Here also you have to be specific unless you love getting vague responses.

Ask them if they will charge a setup fee if you terminate within first 15 days, cost of excess bandwidth and space, cost of upgrading an account and if there are any additional administration and support charges you should be aware of.

Rule #5 - Contact Support. Always contact the webhost’s support department via eMail and, if they provide it, by phone. Try to assess how professional and supportive they are when you ask questions I recommend above.

Rule #6 - Take my Recommendation. I have recommended a host below who I had happily used for over two-years! I am sure you will be glad that you took my suggestion.

I had used over 8 hosts before I settled for HostGator and used them happily for over two years before I had to move on to PowerVPS due to increased requirements. Even today I hear rave reviews about them just so frequently even though they have become one of the largest hosts out there.

The package I recommend is the Baby Plan at $9.95 a month plan. Now if you host 20 sites on this account, it turns out to be less than 50 cents a month! Click this link and then use the coupon Jury to get the first month for just 1 cent.

Even though they offer insanely high space and bandwidth, they don’t have the crazy restrictions like which I have mentioned above. And furthermore, they are a company with pockets deep enough to back these claimed quotes in case some customers ever reach the levels.

They also offer unlimited add-on domains and on-click install for all popular software. What this means is that you can have as many domains as you want on your account.

And with a click of a button, you can install software like WordPress, Joomla, PhpBB and Coppermine among others on your site. Yes, this means that you can setup a site without having any technical skills.

To Signup with HostGator, follow this link and then use the coupon Jury, you will get your first month for just 1 cent.

Remember — a good host means that you will be able to concentrate on developing, promoting and monetizing your websites. And yes, I know from my personal experience that HostGator is one of them.