If you’ve recently been looking online for companies to host your website, you’ve probably been asking yourself: What are unlimited hosting plans?

Well, those unlimited plans are essentially a dishonest marketing tactic certain companies use to sell their services.

In hosting, there is a term we use called overselling. This is essentially the shady practice of setting up many more than the ideal number of sites on a single server.

What this does is extremely slow down performance for everyone hosting their site.

Can Hosting Plans be Unlimited?

Imagine you found a hosting company offering an unlimited package. The plan sounds great, you get unlimited bandwidth, fast speeds and more! 

Even if you didn’t know they were likely overselling, let’s just think about the idea of an unlimited hosting plan for a second.

How can it be unlimited? By definition that means there is literally not a limit to the bandwidth, which is impossible. Even if it’s “way more than you’d ever use”, there’s still a limit.

Some hosting companies won’t even give you the limit in the fine print. This is dishonest and wrong in our opinion.

Service Will Suffer

On the rare occasion that the hosting provider isn’t over-selling their servers, they’ll be offering so much for such little profit, that they’ll literally not be able to offer support. Or, it will suffer severely. 

This is why we NEVER offer unlimited plans. If we did, we wouldn’t be able to offer 24/7 customer service and high-quality hosting. It’s important to be realistic with the service.

In Conclusion

If you’re looking for a high quality, affordable web hosting service, look no further. CanSpace is Canada’s leading hosting provider and domain name registrar.

You can trust that we’ll never over-sell, and will always offer a fair price. Plus, all of our hosting plans come 24/7 support and a free domain on annual terms. Get started now and you could have your website up today!

What are the benefits, and when should you use a CDN?

If you’re like most small business owners, you may not know exactly what a CDN is. The term stands for Content Delivery Network, which is simply a system of servers distributed across the world.

Essentially, CDN’s are used to improve how fast your website loads. By leveraging intelligent geographical placement of servers, it decreases the time it takes for your visitor to load your website.

This is important for you as website speed is an essential factor for your success online.

Why You’d Use a CDN

Speed is important for both user experience, and search engine optimisation. Increased speed will result in the following benefits…

1. Increase Google search rankings
2. Reduce your bounce rate (which will…)
3. Improve your lead capture and sales

At the end of the day – it’s all about your goals. How will a faster website affect your bottom line? As it turns out, it will affect it in a big, positive way. So should you use a CDN? Yes.

If you’re looking to get started with a CDN, take a look at our hosting packages today. CanSpace is a CloudFlare premium partner and CloudFlare CDN services are included free of charge for all of our clients (most places charge $20 or more per month).

In addition to our low prices, we are Canada’s leading web host and domain registrar. So you can rest assured in your decision to host with us.

With so many options out there – how do you choose which web hosting provider to host your website?

It may seem like a hard decision to make. Rest assured, there are just a few things you’ll want to keep in mind when choosing.

• Server Uptime
• Security
• Quantity of Bandwidth
• Website Backups

Let’s go into each one now.

1. Server Uptime

This refers to the time your website is “live” essentially. With any hosting provider, there will be times when your site will go down.

Most of the time, this is because of things breaking on your website and is fixed easily. Sometimes though, the actual server where your site is hosted will get under so much pressure, it goes down.

This isn’t unusual, but it shouldn’t happen often (and downtime is almost always less than an hour)

Most companies will say 99.7% to 99.9% up-time. This is the acceptable range.

Anything less than 99.7% indicates unstable servers. Conversely, if a company claims to have 100% up-time, that should be a red flag as there is literally no way to ensure that, and the company is being dishonest.

2. Security

Make sure to contact the company you are planning to use and ask about their security procedures.

A good hosting provider will ensure there is a strong firewall in place to prevent attacks. At CanSpace, our servers are located behind finely tuned, and actively monitored firewalls that we monitor 24/7 for suspicious activity.

Our server software is also upgraded nightly to ensure any potential exploits are closed immediately.

In addition, we provide our clients with a web application firewall (WAF), based on regularly updated OWASP rules. This prevents against hack attempts to software like WordPress, Joomla, and even custom software – even when not properly patched.

Having a WAF is very important, but many companies don’t provide them. So make sure the companies you research do.

3. Quantity of Bandwidth

Bandwidth refers to the amount of memory or space on the server you get when you sign up. This will determine how fast your website goes and the amount of visitors you can handle.

Our plans start at 15GB and go all the way up to 500GB or more. The more Bandwidth you have, the more busy with content and visitors your site can be.

The one thing to watch for here – is companies that offer “unlimited” plans. Many companies run the shady practice of overselling.

They will offer “unlimited” plans, but throttle (slow down your site) if you go above their actual limits, as there’s really no such thing as unlimited. In addition, most companies that offer unlimited will have little to no support.

Stay away from companies that offer unlimited plans. Other than that – you should be ok.

4. Website Backups

At CanSpace, we back up all of our sites nightly, and we retain a week worth of back-ups.

In addition, the control panel our clients are provided with, cPanel, gives users the chance to back up their sites at any time they want manually.

Doing so ensures you always have a copy of your site in case something breaks or goes down.

In Conclusion

You should now be ready to make an educated decision when choosing your web hosting provider.

Remember, CanSpace is Canada’s leading hosting provider and domain registrar – powering some of Canada’s largest corporations. If you’re looking to get your website online, trust us to provide you with all of the necessities we mentioned here.

Ready to get started? Click here to find a hosting package to suit your needs! If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our live chat now.