Special
Report
The Truth Of Singapore Web Hosting Industry
If you have ever looked for web hosting services
in Singapore, like what we did before, you will be amazed
at the chaos of this industry.
There're hundreds of Singapore-based web hosting
companies out there offering varies hosting packages. It
seems that you have plenty of options while shopping around
for your business web site. But the truth is, more often
than not, you will get lost wondering which package you
should go for.
Do a search at Google or Yahoo for "Singapore
web hosting", you will get a long list of web hosting
companies (among which 1st Singapore Web Hosting
is ranked at No. 1 by the way :-). After a more careful
study, you will find that the price for basically the same
service varies from S$20 to S$120 per month! There's no
standard market price!
Most companies offer dozens of options, ranging
from 10MB storage/0.5GB bandwidth for S$10 per month, to
100MB/3GB for S$25, to 300MB/10GB for S$80... But the problem
is, how could you know how much storage/bandwidth you will
need and therefore are able to make a cost effective choice
when your site has not been up and running yet?
This could be a trap if you don't think carefully.
You may end up upgrading a couple of times as your online
business grows. At the end of the day, you may have to pay
100 dollars per month for your hosting service. This is
way too expensive!
Ridiculously expensive, compared to international
standard.
For instance, the
US hosting service we recommend before we start our
own hosting services charges US$7.95 (less than S$14) flat
fee per month for 800MB storage/40G bandwidth (and much
more features). A quick check at the top 10 Singapore-based
web hosting companies (except for our site:-) returned by
Google reveals that, for the same amount of storage and
bandwidth, you may have to pay up to S$200 if you choose
to host with them.
And nine out of these ten charge a un-refundable
setup fee!
Some of them indicate they offer "unlimited
traffic" at their homepage or product pages, but in
the 10-page-long "Acceptable Usage Policy", there's
a line saying "unlimited traffic doesn't guarantee
unlimited bandwidth". Translation: you may be asked
to upgrade and pay more every now and then until they feel
happy with the amount of money they earn from you.
If you see someone offering "unlimited
storage", you should ask them "Hey can I host
2,000GB pages?" :-)
This is ridiculous. You just can not find
one single web hosting service who offers a simple yet powerful
package large enough for all your future business needs
for an affordable price!
Frustrating, isn't it?!
Take us as an example. Before we started offering
web site design services in Singapore two years ago, all
our online businesses was targeting at International customers,
most of which are US customers. Naturally, all our sites
were, and still are, hosted by US web hosting providers.
Our first web design client from Singapore
wanted to provide streaming videos for their visitors. We
were not so sure how much bandwidth we would need since
one single visitor could mean several MB data transfer or
more - up to 30MB. Given the size of the site, it had a
good potential to attract lots of visitors.
Here came the tough situation. We found a
couple of hosting companies in Singapore who provide streaming
media capabilities with entry price of around S$30 per month.
But if the site really gets popular, we might easily find
ourselves paying S$200-300 per month, which was far more
than affordable for our client.
We failed to find a better deal.
Finally, we hosted it on the US server we
normally use that provides streaming media capability and
enough bandwidth for only S$14 per month.
It makes no difference for end users. Average
surfers won't realize they're accessing a Singapore site
on a US server. But it took some time to convince the directors
of the client why we should do this since our client is
a totally local non-profit organization.
Since then, we haven't seen any improvement
in the web hosting industry of Singapore. The price is still
extremely high - for no reason. We don't bother to host
our sites or our customers' here now even though we ourselves
are based in Singapore. It doesn't make sense to pay several
times more to get less capabilities.
There're also other not-so-good experiences
while dealing with local hosting companies.
Many of the "advanced" features
can only be activated by request. We didn't realize this
when we started an account, only found that we had to contact
them when we wanted to use the feature and got the feature
activated three days later. This is not fair. We paid for
it and it should be ready in place from day one - even if
we don't use it.
These "advanced" features can be
as simple as SSI or CGI-BIN, by the way.
It's strange to ask for permission or get
approval to use something we have paid for!
Another annoying thing is that, some support
staffs are not very sure how to get things done. Often,
we have to tell them how to tweak the server configurations.
That's dangerous, to say the least. We are not computer
engineers. What if we are wrong? But what can we do if the
support people just couldn't make it?
We're also tired of the tedious process to
change something...
And this is the reason we started this site
- 1st Singapore Web Hosting to recommend
a much more powerful, affordable alternative to all Singapore
businesses and individuals. We don't run servers ourselves.
We don't sell web hosting service. We are not a reseller
of any hosting company.
Click
Here To Read The Update
( We do provide our own web hosting service now)
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