Cheap hosting revolution?

Tophost.it is an Italian web hosting company selling low-cost 200MB hosting plans (about 10 euros/year) which include interesting features such as domain registration (.it .com .net .org .info .eu), PHP and MYSQL support, FTP access, Control Panel (basic DNS management), up to 10 POP3 email accounts with antivirus and antispam.

During the last two weeks the company had experienced very serious issues on one node that led to several server crashes and to a temporary unavailability of the hosted websites.
Some Italian bloggers blamed about these disruptions on their blogs writing hot posts referring to the company.

A small debate started: Tophost’s answer to these provocations consisted in sending a newsletter to all customers on the 21st august 2007. In this open-letter, entitled literarily “It’s nice to feel loved” (see the original text in Italian), the company announced the resolution of the problems on the node 03 but also criticized blatantly those customers who wrote hostile articles on their own blogs. Furthermore Tophost asked their satisfied customers to participate in the discussion and to express publicly on the net their satisfaction.

This newsletter caused a new wave of criticizing posts accusing TopHost to adopt the worst communication policies and to be a presumptuous company.

I personally find this way to address customers very peculiar, yet positive: Tophost is simply adopting the same instruments available to the bloggers to reply the accuses and receive feedbacks from the Internet community.

I have been using Tophost services with 4 small websites for 3 years, and I had a very good experience so far.
Technical issues are quite common among cheap hosting companies and I have encountered server disruptions (also for prolonged periods of time) even with far more expensive hosting providers.

In my opinion 10 euros/year is definitely a fair price: this allows almost everyone to buy a domain name and build a basic dynamic website (e.g. a Blog, a simple CMS…) spending an affordable amount of money and avoiding free services that usually add annoying advertisements and provide with a 3rd level domain.