All About Hosting Discounts

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

The wag who coined that phrase was obviously trying to illustrate the truism that you can’t get something for nothing. In the world of web hosting, as elsewhere, this is certainly true. But in the world of hosting, you can frequently get a little more than the next guy — for no additional cost — if you know where to look.

Many hosting companies offer special deals and promotional packages to entice new customers to buy, and existing customers to buy more, of their products. Broadly speaking, these programs can be broken down into three categories:

1. “Promo coupons” or codes
2. Affiliate marketing programs
3. Multi-server discounts

To help you find the best deal, we’ll examine each of these discount programs in detail, explaining how they typically work, what their respective good and bad points are and most importantly, how you can take advantage of them to maximize the value of your hosting service provider relationship.

Promo Coupons and Codes

Probably the most common tactic hosting companies use to earn your business is the discount “promo coupon.” In general, these coupons take the form of special codes you can use when placing your order for hosting services. But different companies use different kinds of coupons, and those differences merit some scrutiny:

What you want: promo codes that offer a limited-time discount to get you on board as a customer.

As ServInt’s COO noted in a series of blog posts on marketing scams in the hosting industry, there’s nothing wrong with a company offering something at a limited-time discount to make it easy for you to give it a try. However, you should avoid codes and coupons that offer “forever” discounts or “buy one get one free”-style deals.

Companies that can afford to offer you “lifetime discounts” or “two for one”-style deals are usually playing games with the numbers — basically giving you a deep discount on a price that was inflated to start with. And while this may net you a fair price on an entry-level product, it can also be a warning sign about the pricing to come when you upgrade or add services in the future.

The best way to sniff out these tricks is to do some research on exactly what you’re getting for your money. All hosting providers are building their service offerings from the same basic set of hardware and service components — so if you see a price, or a discount, that’s too good to be true, it’s probably because they’re skimping somewhere. You can usually find the place where they’re cutting corners by looking at the package specifications — in particular, the server technology they’re using. Deeply discounted hosting service packages are frequently where web hosts dump their obsolete hardware.