Web Design and Web Hosting

admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:09:14 +0000

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

Web Host Price Rankings

admin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:47:21 +0000

Below 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

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:12:25 +0000

Lunarpages
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

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 13:11:34 +0000

Like 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?

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:45:21 +0000

For 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.

What do most hosts have in common?

admin — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:38:15 +0000

Hosting is a very competitive industry and when it comes down to it, most hosts are very similar in a lot of ways. That can make shopping around for a host difficult because it’s hard to tell one host from the next. Today we’ll look at what hosts have in common:

Most hosts offer unlimited, or essentially unlimited, resources: If disk space offered is 10GB or “unlimited”, it basically the same thing for most sites.

Most hosts want you to pay for a year up front: There are a few exceptions, but usually you either have to pay up front or you get a big discount for doing so.

Most hosts offer 24/7 customer service: Again there are exceptions, but a good host should have live support available every hour of every day.

Webfusion hosting review

admin — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:19:02 +0000

Unlike 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.

Most recommended website software

admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:39:35 +0000

If I had to recommend one tool that had the best blend of being easy to use and powerful, my recommendation would be Drupal. Most hosts will install Drupal for you for free, and the software itself is free and open source. There are also hundreds of free modules that you can add that make the software even more powerful

Drupal is a CMS, or Content Management System, so making updates to your site is easy and if you make a change in the future you can easily apply the change to every page of your site without going through the pages one by one.

A few years ago, software as powerful as Drupal would have cost thousands of dollars and for many companies it would have been a good investment, but now it is available for free to individuals and companies, and it is well worth a try.

Host Papa review

admin — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:21:18 +0000

HostPapa 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.

Why do so many hosts offer the same basic thing?

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:37:30 +0000

As you read through our host reviews, you’ll notice a trend. Pretty much all of them offer more disk space, email accounts, and bandwidth than you’ll ever need. Why is that? Most of it is just a marketing gimmick. They know people won’t use all those resources and they are just playing a numbers game. Shared hosting is all about packing as many customers as you can onto a server to spread the costs and increase revenues through high volume. A certain percentage of customers will sign up and never even put up their site, a large percentage put up a small basic site that never really grows, and only a very small number of customers end up using even a fraction of the resources allotted for them.

Hosting is an ultra-competitive industry. It has a fairly low barrier to entry, and once a host is established the incremental cost of adding one more customer is essentially $0. Adding one customer doesn’t require another server, or a new hard drive, or any extra equipment or costs. Adding another thousand customers might, but adding one is basically free for the host. That means you have hundreds of hosts competing for revenue from a pool of customers that have a pretty decent profit margin.