When It Comes to eCommerce and Web Hosting, Big Names Are Often a Big Mistake

It was another week of working on accounts with some of the “big names” in the eCommerce and web hosting world. The “size” of the name is almost directly proportional to the level of headache that I get from trying to handle even simple tasks. To clarify, I’m mostly thinking about cases where I am trying to build some type of PHP-based website.

For example, just about everyone knows Yahoo, and they provide many great services. But you might want to think again before getting into web hosting with Yahoo. My headache with Yahoo this week stems from their lack of support for PHP. They say they offer it, but what they mean is PHP over CGI instead of PHP 5. Hey, I would have even settled for PHP 4.

I’ve knocked around ProStores before because of my level of disappointment with their product. ProStores doesn’t even come close to Yahoo because they’re still at the “scripting? what’s that?” stage.

Think you’ll just use GoDaddy instead? Careful there. GoDaddy is becoming a household word (if they’re not there already) because they excel at marketing. But it comes at the expense of infrastructure development and user experience design. Many of the services from GoDaddy are functional (although slow when it comes to web hosting), but where you will likely be frustrated is trying to get to where you need to go. GoDaddy hasn’t quite figured out the value of clear navigation. Their website is terribly confusing. GoDaddy, when people talk about making sites sticky and keeping people on your website, they don’t mean “send your customers on a treasure hunt for every little thing they need to do”.

Now the above are just a few examples names many internet consumers know. In the web hosting world, strictly speaking, their are some big names that do an excellent job. Your really big names in the hosting world, like Network Solutions, etc. are generally adequate - although hosting is on the slower side. For us, we’re still pretty happy with companies that we use like Site 5.