Often, if you are willing to pay for more time up front, sometimes 2, 3, or more years, then you can get an even lower price on hosting. Here are the hosts we’ve reviewed ranked by their lowest available price:
Price Rankings Lowest monthly price
Webhostingpad $1.99
Lunarpages $2.95
Webfusion $2.99
JustHost $3.45
StartLogic $3.95
Super Green Hosting $3.95
Dot 5 hosting $3.95
IX Web Hosting $3.95
1&1 $3.99
myhosting $4.84
PowWeb $4.88
Pronet $4.95
HostGator $4.95
FatCow $4.95
iPower Web Hosting $4.95
GoDaddy $4.99
HostPapa $5.95
Omnis Network $5.95
Bluehost $6.95
Thinkhost $7.95
TierraNet $7.95
HostRocket $8.99
Network Solutions $9.29
Archive for the ‘Web Host Reviews’ Category
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
Web Host Price Rankings
Monday, February 15th, 2010Below are hosts rated, from least expensive to most expensive, based on paying either monthly or up to 1 year up front.
Price Rankings Monthly price if 1 year or less
Lunarpages 2.95
Webfusion 2.99
JustHost 3.45
1&1 3.99
PowWeb 4.88
Dot 5 hosting 4.95
IX Web Hosting 4.95
StartLogic 4.95
Webhostingpad 4.95
GoDaddy 4.99
FatCow 5.5
HostPapa 6.95
Omnis Network 6.95
Bluehost 7.95
iPower Web Hosting 7.95
myhosting 7.95
Pronet 7.95
Super Green Hosting 7.95
Thinkhost 7.95
TierraNet 7.95
HostGator 8.95
HostRocket 8.99
Network Solutions 9.29
Review of Lunarpages
Monday, February 8th, 2010Lunarpages
Customer service: On their cheapest package Lunarpages does not allow phone support. You can qualify for 24/7 support by getting their package that starts at $4.95/month.
Pricing: $2.95/month
Shared SSL: Yes
Dedicated IP address: You can add a dedicated IP address for $4.95/month
Overall, this is an average deal.
Review of Pronet
Friday, February 5th, 2010Like most hosts we review, Pronet offers plenty of resources. Here’s how they match up in other areas:
Customer service: They do offer 24/7 toll-free customer service and our test call was answered in 15 seconds, but they do not offer live chat support.
Pricing: $4.95/month if you pay for 2 years up front, $7.95/month if you pay for 1 year up front
Shared SSL: Yes
Dedicated IP address: You cannot get a dedicated IP on their cheapest plan, so in order to get one your price will go up to at least $11/month.
Overall, this is an average deal.
What sets hosts apart?
Thursday, February 4th, 2010For all the ways hosts are similar, there are some big ways that the good ones are separated from the lower quality ones. These are the areas we try to focus on. They are more difficult to see on the surface, but they are the important features.
Quality of customer service: Most offer 24/7 customer service, but that doesn’t help much if they take 20 minutes to answer their phones.
Dedicated IP addresses: This is an important feature for the long term growth of your site so it’s important to have a host that at least offers them as an option.
Quality of bandwidth providers: This is one of the most difficult to judge, but not all bandwidth is created equal, there are some providers who are cheap and less reliable.
Quality of servers: Like bandwidth, this is hard to judge but server quality can impact the reliability and speed of your site.
Webfusion hosting review
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010Unlike many competitors, the cheapest Webfusion package does not included unlimited resources, but since “unlimited” is mostly just a marketing gimmick it would be fair to group them in with the unlimited crowd. With 10GB of disk space, 300GB of traffic, and 1000 email accounts, everything is essentially unlimited for most sites. They also include 10 MySQL databases and free shared SSL. All of this at $2.99/month makes Webfusion
a great value.
They do offer 24/7 live customer service, but only by phone and not by live chat. Our test phone call was answered in 1 minute, 30 seconds. Two issues that do drop them in our standings is they do not offer a dedicated IP address and even though they do offer a free Drupal installation, they are only installing version 4.7.8, while they should be installing version 6.
Host Papa review
Friday, January 29th, 2010HostPapa takes great pride in offering “certified green” web hosting, meaning they buy their energy from certified renewable sources. Several hosts we’ve reviewed do the same.
As far as what they offer, HostPapa is very competitive with other value hosts. With unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and email accounts, and 100 MySQL databases, they offer all the resources you’ll likely need. All this comes at a price point of $6.95/month if you pay for a year, $5.95/month if you pay for 2 years, or $4.95/month if you pay for 3 years.
They do not offer 24/7 live customer service. Their live support hours are limited. Our test phone call was answered in 1 minute but our test chat was not answered.
They also do not offer a free shared SSL certificate, and a dedicated IP will cost an extra $36/year.
Omnis Network
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010Omnis Network has won a lot of hosting awards from various review sites. While we’re not ready to hand out an award just yet, they do offer a good value. With unlimited disk space, bandwidth, email accounts, and MySQL databases, all at a cost of $6.95/month if you pay for a year (down to $5.95/month if you pay for 2 years), they do provide everything you need at a low cost.
Omnis Network does offer 24/7 toll-free support over both the phone and live chat. Our test phone call was answered in 37 seconds, but our test chat was answered in 2 minutes 50 seconds. Another thing that really sets them apart is that they do provide a dedicated IP address included with each package, something very rare at these prices.
Myhosting Review
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010myhosting has been around since 1997, which in the web hosting world is a very long time. That means they survived the .com bust and are still going today, so they must be doing something right.
Their basic package includes 5GB of disk space and 50GB of bandwidth, along with 250 email accounts. While those aren’t “unlimited” like many competitors, those numbers are virtually unlimited because it’s far more than most sites require. The also include 1 MySQL database but not a static IP address, and a dedicated IP address is not an upgrade option.
myhosting does offer 24/7 live support by both phone and live chat. Our test chat was answered in 1 minute and 30 seconds, and our test phone call was answered in 3 minutes 54 seconds.
IX Web Hosting Review
Monday, January 25th, 2010IX Web Hosting offers 3 plans, ranging from $3.95/month (when on sale) to $12.95 month. We’ll take a look at their cheapest package.
The basic IX Web Hosting package includes unlimited disk space and bandwidth, 2500 email accounts, a shared SSL certificate, and 50 MySQL databases. One thing that really sets them apart is they also include 2 dediated IP addresses.
IX Web Hosting does offer 24/7 customer service both over the phone and live chat. Our test phone call was not answered after 10 minutes. Our test chat request was answered in 51 seconds.