Hello everyone.

I have a few miscellanious questions regarding my search for paid web hosting after being unceremoniously shut down by my (former) free host for (gasp) having 2GB/mo. of traffic!

• Why do these companies assume that just because I own my own domain, that I'm a business entity? I emailed three hosts that have "personal plans" but they're all subdomain plans, and two of the reps who emailed me back said, in essence, "this type of account is not suitable for businesses, and thus does not allow a transfer of domains to our nameservers."

• How come the range of offers varies so widely? Considering the wide availability of web hosting, I assumed it was pretty much commoditized by now. Most commodities don't vary too much in price, but the variance in pricing for the very same features can exceed 100% from company to company.

• Somewhat related to the above, is why are companies so inflexible? I asked several companies about hosting me with a custom feature-set, so that I wouldn't need to pay for features my site will not use such a PHP, MySQL database, 99999 email accounts, and all, but still get lots of disk space and transfer (bang for the buck). They said they could not do that for shared hosting. Some said they could for dedicated hosting, but my site dosen't need a dedicated server.

Thanks - Gatta

#1: I think the point the hosting providers are trying to make is that if you want your own domain name, you'll need one of their "business" plans, regardless of whether your site is personal or business.

#2: There's more to web hosting than just the numbers you see on the "hosting plans" page. The amount of resources a company wants to invest in tech support and customer service will affect how much each customer "costs" them. The adage "you get what you pay for" applies to hosting, although there are excpetions (that's why boards like this one are valuable--they help identify low-cost hosts that have good customer service, and high-price hosts that have poor customer service). There are other factors: Some hosts limit the number of sites-per-server in order to increase performance; this naturally increases costs. Some hosts have multiple bandwidth carriers with high-security operation centers, while there are others that operate their hosting business off a cable modem located in their den.

#3: Not all hosts are inflexible, but a company does have to have a business plan and deciding how much they want to charge for services is part of that. If a host is low cost and is running at a thin profit margin, they're probably not going to be receptive to someone who's looking to cut corners off their existing plans to save money. I don't know what kind of custom plan you were looking for, but if you post a request to the advertising forum here I'm sure you'll get some responses.

Chris has already answered your questions well. I'll just add that services are not commodities. Neither are many items (like computers) that some people describe as commodities, at least not in the sense of interchangeable items, the way many people mean the term. I dealt with those when I was a commodities broker. One batch of soybeans is pretty much like another. One computer may be very different than another.