I guess you could call it a web trend, but recently I’ve seen several sites that offer hosting, and I’m just not sure how they work. One I saw just now is CrownedHost, which was advertised on Snark Forums. Here’s a snippet of the very beginning of the index page’s HTML:

If you’re familiar with HTML, the sight of that should send you screaming into the night. The rest of the source is equally bizarre and poorly formed. Now, if you’re new to the web design scene and don’t know HTML yet, it probably wouldn’t bother you to see the source of your host’s site looking like that, but there are other problems here that make me wonder how anyone could possibly buy hosting from a place like this:

• One of the owners of the site admits on her personal site that she is 17 years old, a senior in high school. I don’t feel it’s a slight against her to say that I’m not exactly rock-solid on her business skills, considering her age and education level.
• The ‘About’ page of CrownedHost acknowledges that it’s a reseller bought in 2007, so it hasn’t exactly been around for ages, working out any kinks and letting its owners get experience.
• The site doesn’t look professional or impressive to me at all. Three till Seven is hosted by Dreamhost, and whether you like or dislike their hosting skills, they at least look the part. Their index page at the time I’m writing this is bragging about how they’ve been hosting for ten years now. Their copyright statement goes from 1997 to 2008. They have links to such things as a Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Contact Us along the bottom of the page, which are things I’ve come to expect from any business’s online site. Proceeding to their signup page, I notice that they’re using a secure connection, which is reassuring to me. Things like this help to inspire confidence, and I don’t get any of that from reseller sites like CrownedHost; they just feel amateur.

The only reason I picked on CrownedHost is because I saw them on Snark today and they were the last in a series of unprofessional reseller sites I’ve seen lately. Nothing against the two girls that run it, I’m sure they’re lovely people, I just don’t trust them with my money and web site.

Do people really make money from those things? How do they even form? Two BFF’s in high school with no real-world experience decide, hey, let’s try and sell domains, hot dog. I don’t see how that would work at all, because I’m so leery of companies I’ve never heard of if they don’t look legit. Pretty much if I think you’ve never had to file taxes before, I don’t want to buy something from you, except at maybe a bake sale or a raise-money-for-our-New-York-trip car wash.