Here’s a little discussed web hosting secret that you’re unlikely to find on any of my competitor’s websites (unless they stole it from me!) - and it concerns the secret limitations put on some web hosting accounts by some small business web hosting companies.

You see, with some of the super-cheap small business web hosting companies, unbeknownst to you, they will limit what you can do with your hosting account.

They may, for example, ban you from uploading certain types of files (such as MP3s, PDFs, WAVs etc).

They may disable some basic scripting functions without informing you when you sign up for your account so you can hardly get any scripts working - even when following the installation instructions to the letter.

And so on.

I’ve experienced this myself.

I paid for a year’s hosting upfront with a cheap and cheerful small business web hosting company, only to find that the two basic scripts I wanted to use on my site (one to display related news items, the other to create a link directory) wouldn’t work on their servers.

It’s important to say that before I invested in that web hosting account I carefully checked the technical requirements of the scripts against what the web host was offering and it all matched up fine.

So how come I couldn’t get the scripts working?

Well I emailed the small business web hosting companies’ technical support department for advice just to be told that they don’t offer advice on any scripts because I was on their budget account.

So then I resorted to emailing the programmers who had sold me these two scripts asking them to take a look and offer any advice they could.

And despite the fact that both happily agreed to help neither of them could work out exactly what the problem was - save to say that in some way my web hosting account was limited but they couldn’t work out why!

Both suggested I find a new small business web host, which in frustration I did but the important thing to note is that the ultra-cheap web hosting I had bought came with many untold, “hidden” problems that the web hosting company wouldn’t face up to and my programmers couldn’t diagnose and treat. And you know how much I hate changing web hosts!

I don’t know whether these limitations are put in place to save costs or to prevent newbies from mucking up their accounts but it can be quite a frustrating situation I can assure you.

Further evidence that you get what you pay for with small business web hosting companies, that the cheapest option isn’t always the best and that getting personal recommendations from others is a major key to getting the right small business web hosting account from the word go.