If you’re looking for an email hosting service, don’t just look at the top-ranked web hosting services and get blinded by offers of CPanel or unlimited bandwidth and storage. There’s always a catch behind those claims. We’re definitely avid users of Rackspace, but of course, there’s nothing wrong with trying something new. True enough, we recently found that BlueHost.com, a top-ranked WordPress hosting provider, was not up to our expectations.
So before you sign up for something, make a point to understand what the package offers, and think about whether or not it suits your needs. We’d have to say that some web hosting companies, especially those who provide customers with CPanel, are nothing but lazy. Not all web hosting customers have extensive technical knowledge, and will therefore find it difficult to tackle technical issues that might crop up. Like, how would a customer know that when an error pops up with PHP, it usually includes a file error?
These problems arise due to the fact that CPanel allows customers to customise features in their hosting account. Too many customisations often lead to confusion and unnecessary packages. Some customers even unknowingly disable their outgoing SMTP server, which makes contact forms and WordPress hosting very unfriendly to users. What happens is, when a user receives comments, they’re not notified accordingly.
Additionally, while some email hosts claim to give you unlimited bandwidth, there are still limitations. After you’ve seen your bandwidth shooting up, you’ll also notice that the loading time for your website has slowed down. So, while their claims of unlimited bandwidth are true, there are hidden bandwidth constraints.
Also, have you ever been enticed by free mailboxes? A friend asked me recently about Google Apps‘ offer of 25 free mailboxes, and if that would affect our business. While his concerns aren’t baseless, he was surprised to learn that we actually suggest the service to our customers and even set it up for them for free. Wait a minute; doesn’t this present a conflict of interest with our own email service (which can cost up to RM99 per mailbox a year)?
Well, as we’re on the frontline, we’re always trying to be different from other service providers. We evaluate new products and services to find the best solutions that’ll work for our customers. We want customers to trust us like we trust Google, in believing that their search engines will give us the most accurate search results. We tested Google Apps, worked and played with it for a couple months, and found that this new application can, in fact, improve our customer’s email communication. But, of course, a single solution can’t solve all problems.
Looking back, we’re glad that we brought Rackspace’s business email solution to Malaysia, although it was one of the most expensive email solutions around. Today, we’re proud to be one of the most reliable email solution companies in Malaysia!
With that in mind, our no-frills web hosting services will only cost RM80 a year. The standard package we have comes with 12GB of bandwidth, 10GB of storage and 1000 compute cycles. Almost 99% of our current website owners use no more than 20% of the usage. For those exceeding their bandwiths, they can rest assured that we don’t badger them into upgrading, which can be costly. We’ll only suggest an upgrade if it is the only solution.
For example we’ve encountered a web owner who accidently uploaded one of Lady Gaga’s songs in MP3, and his bandwidth shot up to few GB a day. Do you think he needed to buy extra bandwidth? By identifiying where goes wrong, we can solve the bandwidth problem without additional upgrade. I don’t think so. Also, we’re the first to limit single-host names per hosting service. Meaning, if you want to have blog.abc.com and abc.com, you’ll need to subscribe to two hosting packages.
