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Why You Shouldn’t Buy a Hosting Plan Before You Try It

Would you buy clothing before you try it on? Would you buy a fragrance before you smell it? Didn’t you buy your car only after a test drive? And rarely will we buy food unless we’ve tasted it first right? So with web hosting it should be no different. Why commit your hard-earned money to a year of service before you try the features that you think you may need in a hosting plan?

You should test-drive your hosting

The rationale behind using the trial period is for you to use the hosting plan and judge its usefulness before purchasing. Hosting firms with superior hosting plans do give incentives to offer samples of their service. Sadly, not many companies allow for a trial period of their service so you may be left in the dark until after you part with your money. Some money back guarantees are no good either. Many web hosting companies have been known to pass customer’s phone call around, from one department to another, before they even consider giving you your money back.

Web Hosting Trial Account is Hard to Come By

Great online businesses with superior products let customers try out all the time. Take a look at what iTunes and Amazon do. Before buying a song through iTunes, they let you listen to a short clip of the song. Amazon will send you sample chapters of an ebook. It is really not difficult to do right? But why not many companies are doing it?

To be honest, we are not sure why not so many web hosts offer some kind of trial period (and no, money back guarantee is not the same as trial account as you have to pay in advance and you may not get your money back). However, would you say that a hosting company that does give free trial could be more reliable as they are so confident with their service?

Hosting Companies That We Tested

In order to give you a run for your money, we have tested a number of companies that offer free or very cheap trial account. These companies include 000webhost (a.k.a Hosting24), Weebly, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, besthostingpro.com, 1freehosting.com, uhostall.tk, 2freehosting.com, byethost.com and Hostgator. Most of these web hosts we tested offer no expiry on their free account except for Hostgator which gives one month trial using special coupon code (see below). Hostgator also charges $0.01, which is as good as free, while the others do not require anykind of payment.

However, the result is really quite surprising. Out of the many, only Hostgator and Weebly performs very well in terms of uptime. Some of the web hosting plans gave us websites and blogs which are available barely 50% of the time.

In terms of features offered, Weebly, WordPress.com and Blogger.com offer the least features because they do not allow PHP scripting, database usage or FTP access like the rest. On the other hand, 000webhost, besthostingpro.com, 1freehosting.com, uhostall.tk, 2freehosting.com, and byethost.com allow for PHP scripting but each of them has some kind of limitation which gives error messages on our WordPress pages.

Based on our research, it is obvious that Hostgator is the best web host. We also found a special coupon that will give 25% off any hosting plan from Hostgator (see below). That makes them quite an amazing choice for hosting.

But that is not the most important conclusion of this research. This research is all about the importance of testing when choosing a product, be it web hosting or any other service. Can you imagine if you did not try a hosting plan and randomly picks one of the above? You have 80% chance of landing on a bad web host.