The X9 web hosting company was established in 1998.
We noticed a need for a solid and low-cost web hosting service and designed a budget hosting strategy to meet that demand.
This was at a period when obtaining a web hosting account was not inexpensive.
Some companies were costing about £200 per year, and resources were scarce; at best, you got around 50 Mb of disc space with 500 Mb of traffic.
Our Mini Virtual Server had a lot of resources, and it was the cheapest fully featured production level shared hosting option on the market at the time, at only £9 per year.
How did we pull it off?
Working with Designer Servers, the first virtual vps product was built, much ahead of its time, by dividing an off-the-shelf server into many virtual servers, each with its own login.
Without the burden of hosting a pricey data centre, we were able to commit to significantly lower fixed expenditures that were scaleable as our business developed.
Many people imitated us over the years, and the virtual private server (VPS) became a well-known Internet product promoted by cPanel, which was based on our original application from the late 1990s.
You should choose your host wisely if your website is vital to you.
Only a small percentage of the thousands of websites providing hosting on the Internet today are data centres.
The vast majority of these sites are managed by channel partners, resellers, and sub resellers.
Purchasing a trustworthy hosting service directly from a data centre is the safest option.
However, this is frequently highly expensive - and not because it is the greatest service available.
If data centres exclusively sold to end users, they would go out of business. Their business model is centred on reselling practically all of their resources through a network of hundreds of channel partners, including X9 Internet.
Because it would be risky for them to compete with their partners, they raise their end-user prices. However, a channel partner can provide a high-quality service with outstanding support at a low cost because it does not have large datacenter overheads.
This is therefore the appropriate hosting company for you.
Always confirm that a hosting service has full domain registrar accreditation while making a decision. Signing up otherwise could be hazardous.
There are hundreds of so-called 'providers' who will sell you a dirt-cheap deal with no assistance, and your host and websites may disappear if the server becomes overburdened.
Search for unlimited web hosting on ebay.com, and you'll find a slew of adverts offering unlimited web hosting for 99 cents a year.
Others offer free site hosting in exchange for a one-pound setup fee.
If you need a dependable service, we urge you to stay away from those people.
When all have fantastic informative and professional looking web sites, it's nearly hard to identify if a web host is a data centre, channel partner, reseller, sub-reseller, or just a bloke doing this from home for a bit of beer money with an eBay listing for 99 pence.
This is due to the fact that there are now so many web builders, such as ours, that can construct fantastic-looking websites with just a few clicks.
It's advisable to look at their domain names and do a whois query to see when they were registered, which could give you a better insight.
We registered x9internet.com in 2004, but our US branch was registered much earlier, in 1998, so we've been operating for quite some time.
You can also use review sites to learn more about a web host, but do so with caution because review sites are not always accurate or dependable.
In general, angry consumers use review sites to vent their frustrations with a web hosting provider
For example, a customer's website is hacked because he is careless with his login credentials. To prevent the hackers from causing harm to the server, the web host disables this website and advises the customer that he must re-upload his website from a backup into a new account with a new password.
However, the customer did not make a backup and thus no longer has access to the original website files.
He's now furious because the web host has denied him access to his hacker-infected files on the server, and he runs off to the review sites to slam the web host.
Many web providers address this by creating hundreds of false 'positive' reviews to obscure a negative review.
As a result, we have decided not to participate in this practise.
As a result, be cautious when evaluating web host reviews as part of your decision-making process.
We do have some negative feedback from angry ex-customers who were forced to cancel their hosting for the reasons stated above.
However, there aren't many, and they were gathered over a period of more than two decades.