It is common knowledge that advertising is the engine of progress, while the Internet is a veritable product of this progress. There is hardly an information resource in the Russian segment of the Internet without the omnipresent ad banners. As was to be expected, each banner trumpets an offer much better than that of competitors who just happen to be advertising via the same web resource. Yet it often happens that after clicking a banner things turn out not quite as they are painted: advertising tends to embellish the service offered. In this respect, online advertising is no different from any offline marketing activities. Be that advertising of any website or a strictly commercial service, such as web hosting. Advertising of the latter, it being one of the most peculiar online services, accounts for the bulk of online advertising, perhaps being second only to news website advertising (porn advertising does not count!).
In attracting customers, many hosting providers (we deliberately avoid giving examples so as to avoid any suspicious of an ulterior motive) far from always reveal the entire “truth” about the service they offer. In lauding their services, companies often seek to relegate to the background some subtleties that can both prove highly important to the user and even cause the customer to switch to the service of a competitor. Notably, the latter may not always offer better terms. It’s just that the rival PR campaign was better orchestrated.
As a rule, such embellishment is not an attempt at deliberately misleading the customer. It is manifested through concealing certain aspects, which are most often described in fine print as a note to the price list at the bottom of a page or in an annex to the contract. On the one hand, the customer has no right to accuse the provider of concealing any information about the service offered. On the other hand, there is always a large probability that it will not be until completing the payment that a person unversed in the subtleties of the pricing policy of hosting providers will discover that he bought not quite what he expected… Most seem to prefer to learn the hard way that one must read not just the contracts and price lists, but also annexes and notes regardless of their font size.