Hosting my website in Zimbabwe, am i being ripped off?

Question

so i have a friend, acquaintance would be a more befitting title, wh convince me to host with him, paid the guy $70 bucks, 20 for ZISPA, the domain i mean and then $50 for hosting.

So am new to these things, and i a like dude, my site has a potential to become uhm, popular, like get frequent visits and so on, will you be able to support this, he says yeah, so we strike up a deal

and in summary for $50 hosting a year, i got 500MB disk space, am not complaining since there are very few images on my site and i only have used like 40 MB, but what worries me now is the Monthly Bandwidth Transfer its 3GB and having launched the site last week, i alredy have 400 users, and the cpane stats inform me that i have already used one gig of my Monthly Bandwidth Transfer.

A bit disturbing for a site thats a week old, so i whatsapp the guy, and i a like dude, what does Monthly Bandwidth Transfer  mean, coz i am like already used up one third of whatever it is, so what happens when it rouns out, and he says your site stops showing.!!! WTF!!! you said f my site gets heavy traffic you can support this, and he is like dont worry, the stats are no big deal, i will fix it, the one gig used up is probably coz its a new site, i am like ok  cool but i have a bad feeling about this.

Is this guy ripping me off? is this a fair deal for $50/year? I was just over at godaddy and i saw fantastic webhosting plans of $3 bucks a month , unlimited bandwidth and 100gb disk space unlimited mails etc which means per year they charge $36 right?

so please help, what do you think i should do guys?this is a ripoff right?whats the like common charge or benchmark for webhosting for an average site?

Answer 1

I can't really say you are being ripped off. Effectively, for $50, you are paying about $4 a month for hosting which is not much for the service that you getting. 3gb of bandwidth is actually a lot especially if your website isn't hosting any large graphics and images as well as multimedia. I am a web developer myself and i use Afrihost and Axxess down south to host my websites. With Afrihost's entry level linux hosting you pay R49 a month for 3gb bandwidth - same as yours but slightly more expensive. For 10gb you pay R99 a month and unlimited you will have to fork out R399 a month. As you can see, you are  actually getting what you are paying for. Of course there's other things to consider as well such as support, mySQL databases, email addresses, plugins for wordpress and cms's etc. Some hosting companies do it better and some don't

Godaddy is definitely cheaper but you need to understand that they have servers in the United States where bandwidth is cheaper  and there is much more competition. Unfortunately on our side of the world we have to pay much more to enjoy these services. I think paying $50 for a year's hosting with 3gb of bandwidth every month is a lot but i don't think it's your friend's fault (there's a possibility he might have put his own markup as well).

Hosting a website is no rocket science though. Do your research and bypass the middleman (your acquaintance). You can go direct to these hosting companies and do it yourself

Answer 2

The figures you mention don't look bad at all except next time demand a written agreement that clearly states the deliverables and specs of your hosting package which you can then use to present anywhere for a second option. Bear in mind that you should expect to pay a premium for professional service and support not necessarily the basic price of the product. You are better off with someone you can consult 24/7 than just buying a cheap product then struggling with support. With your friend near by, you can concentrate on your core business and he'll take care of the tech side of things but, in my opinion, he's obviously getting too little for his time.

Answer 3

i think yo deal lacked good paper work or proffesionalism in bussiness bru u must read da terms and onditions...its a good idea to host from your friend coz if they is an promblem iu quicky solve it...go daddy mighty take hours to solve an promblem.....secondly u a expecting yo site to have more traffic have good agrements with yo hoster.

Answer 4

Theres no such thing as unlimited!!!!

Godady and co may offer unlimited space and bandwidth but its shackled into "Fair Usage Policies" and they throttle based on CPU usage among other things - that means if you have a reasonably busy cpu intensive site (like wordpress or Question2Answer) you will get throttled and likely see lots of "usage limit exceeded" errors on your site

that said i have noticed south african and zimbabwean hosts (especially those that host there servers in US or UK - which is a surprisingly large amount) they are doing such low bandwidth for 1 reason only and that is profit, because until fairly recently broadband internet packages have had incredibly low limits (eg 10GB etc) they have cashed in on this because users think that its just like there broadband service!

i know for a fact that bandwidth costs are very low in the US and UK and i could offer the same hosting packages for similar prices but offer 30GB for the equivalent package and still be making a profit.

the providers that do host in SA or even ZW charge for that little bandwidth because there costs are that high, they likely set the cost across the board to not confuse customers which means they break even in ZW/SA but making huge profit on there servers hosted in UK/US

Answer 5

You are being ripped off.

GoDaddy is an option but my problem with big companies is their support. It sucks and is very slow. And if you have to call them, the phone bill will be out of this world...if you manage to get their number that is. (Do you know Google's contact number??? #JustChecking) So you can go for 48 hours and your site is down and all you can do is wait....and wait.

I had a resent issue with www.whmcs.com and i was so frustrated i almost cancelled the licence. And up to this day (4 weeks later) i still have 3 outstanding tickets.

Do I also have to mention www.cpanel.net have failed to resolve a simple DNS error that i have been sitting with for 10 months.

Answer 6

I just pray you know that traffic to a website is not only limited to humans. Those bot and automated spammers scanning your site for "stuff" also contribute to the traffic. Google Search is an example, as it searches and indexes your website, it will be chewing your bandwidth.

Comments

i didnt knw, definitely an eye opener, i mean i knw there is bots, and spiders etc, but i never realised they account for the bandwith!!i never knew bandwidth could be limited

---

any requests to your site (automated or manual, intentional or hack attempts) account for traffic as at the end of the day the bandwidth has to be paid for at some point and everything generates bandwidth

Answer 7

Since you have already paid for a year you can put-up with that but when your visits increase and security becomes your concern, godaddy!