The Fast Lane Method for finding a web host focusses on the best PLAN not the best hosting company by giving you a search form that you can use in order to search host plans by a particular attribute. For example, you could search 16 companies and 66 hosting plans for,
- plans with unlimited email accounts available as one of its features,
- plans that cost between $5.00 – $10.00 p/month,
- or all hosting companies offering managed hosting service,
- plans which will migrate your WordPress Site for you,
- or best of all, combine all 4 of these.
- Overall there are 11 filters (more on the way) to dissect the results.
Why is Fast Lane Method useful?
Hosting companies tailor their plans to specific types of users and hence asking for a good hosting company doesn’t ensure that you are the kind of customer that that host is aiming toward. If you go to a hosting company and don’t find something you like then you have to wade through a lot of information in order to find a plan that works for you all the while avoiding a cost increase after the initial contract (ie 12 months of hosting). I’ll give some examples below to illustrate the amount of choice on offer and how frustrating this can be. Fast Lane Method reduces the time and frustration factor in finding a host.
For example,
- some hosts ‘hide’ their ‘real prices’ by offering a lower cost p/month on the first invoice and then increasing the price (sometimes between 2x and 4x the initial price!) on the next invoice. So, its hard to keep the price in mind when comparing two plans because there are actually 4 different prices to keep in your head.
- On top of this the prices change over the length of the plan. For example, a plan can be over 1, 12 or 36 months commonly and each time you change the term both the initial and the renewal cost change.
- From there you still have to worry about RAM, bandwidth, how many emails you need, how many sites you need to support, is the customer service any good etc etc.
- You can start to see how this can be very difficult to maintain a clear understanding of what plan will work for you and what plan won’t. It leads us to make bad decisions over hosting that we later regret.
Our Fast Lane method tries to help make this decision easier for people:
We called it the Fast Lane Method because we likened it to having a magical traffic lane you can use to get out of bumper the bumper traffic because the frustration we felt while trying to find hosting was similar to that we felt when sitting in traffic unable to do anything about out predicament!
