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Greenville Web Hosting Review

admin — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 12:21:23 +0000

Greenville Web Hosting Review

Initial Impression of Greenville Web Host

Greenville hosting is a web hosting company with a strong emphasis on utilizing green technology for its web hosting. Besides offering 24 hour support, we notice that this web host has one of the lowest customers turnover in the industry. We wanted to see why so we called the support and we knew immediately that it was because the wait time before getting connected to a representative was instant. This is pretty rare in the web hosting industry especially during peak hours when we called.

Price and Cost Effectiveness

Currently as of mid December, Greenville Web Hosting is offering a discount on their web hosting package of $2.99 per month if you subscribe bi-annually or $3.95 if prepaid annually. We thought this price was very competitive in the industry considering that you are not only getting hosting, but domain registration for the price. They probably offer one of the most competitive package in the industry. At the moment, they offer no other pricing plans

Reliability

Greenville web hosting offers 99.9% Uptime. After several weeks of our testing, we feel that Greenville hosting offers superb uptime. We haven’t had any interruptions on the test sites and we feel that the websites hosted on the servers always seem to run optimally even during peak hours. They also do not overload their servers with excessive users causing the servers to go down.

Cpanel Control Panel

Greenville also uses the latest version of Cpanel. Their Cpanel has a lot of great add-ons including a website builder tool. This tool is called RVSiteBuilder. It includes a lot of wonderful Royalty Free Images – more than the average site building software. They also include Fantastico Control Panel software suite which includes numerous scripts and software for web hosting. They provide 24 hours support thru their toll free number at 877-998-4678. Their support is US based and is one of the best we’ve seen. Their representatives actually take their time to help you without rushing thru the call.

Conclusion

Overall, Greenville Website hosting is an excellent choice for web hosting. It offers fantastic 24 hour support everyday based in America for a low price. The control panel is easy to use and the reliability is superb. For $2.95 per month with a two year plan, we feel that you will not find a better web host especially for the low price they are offering for a limited time.

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HostGator Review

admin — Mon, 23 May 2011 03:12:49 +0000

HostGator Review

Host Gator web hosting has come a long way since its start in CEO Brent Oxley’s dorm room in 2002. Over the past seven years, Host Gator hosting has grown to be a leader in the market of shared and reseller hosting. In fact, HostGator was named the 21st fastest growing private company in America in 2008. As Host Gator thrives, adding more employees and services, it continues to maintain a high level of customer service and support.

Currently based out of Houston, Texas, HostGator hosts more than 2,500,000 domains. To meet the needs of all those customers, Host Gator web hosting has more than 200 capable employees, available around the clock. Every HostGator hosting plan is fully backed up by a 45-day money back guarantee.

One of HostGator hosting’s many unique qualities is that they provide access to the industry leading SiteStudio website designer, an extremely easy program to navigate – sure to help even the beginner with their website development. Priding themselves on customer care and approval, Host Gator has received many positive customer reviews.

Last but not least, HostGator has committed itself to providing greener solutions for their shared and reseller servers. With their certified Renewable Energy Credits in wind power, HostGator is not just neutralizing their environmental impact, they’re reversing it. The next generation of ecological web hosting is here. Host Gator provides clean solutions to meet your online needs.

Price Value

Although Host Gator web hosting specializes in reseller hosting, they also offer reasonably priced shared and dedicated server hosting plans.

Host Gator‘s shared web hosting plans start at $4.95 a month (the recently upgraded “Hatchling” plan) and include unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Their reseller plans are offered for prices ranging from $24.95 to $99.95 per month, and their dedicated server plans range from $174.00 to $374.00 per month. Put it all together and you have one company that wants to remain competitive in the web-hosting market.

Also included in these packages are features such as free set-up, unlimited MySQL databases, SpamAssasin software that will help reduce the amount of junk email received, 99.9% uptime, and a 45-day money-back guarantee

In addition, customers can feel good about saving money while saving the environment. Host Gator is now 130% wind powered through their Renewable Energy Credits. Responsible energy sources coupled with varied web hosting options translate to a brighter future for everyone.

Reliability

HostGator has chosen The Planet, located in Dallas, Texas, to house their data center. The Planet boasts over 35,000 square feet of raised floor space, and features state-of-the-art security, safety, and cooling systems. This facility is accompanied with Multiple TXU electrical grids, 4800 volts of input power, DataTrax monitoring software for the whole data center infrastructure, and a fully meshed and redundant Certified Cisco Network featuring 10 backbone providers.

In addition, Host Gator has invested in wind power energy solutions that are close to home. When you consider all of these features, HostGator‘s customers have peace of mind regarding the security, reliability, and energy-efficiency of their servers.

Customer Support

Host Gator is becoming one of the leading companies offering quick responses and a personal touch to their support system. They present 24/7/365 phone support, online chat, fax, peer support forums, and a wide variety of cPanel flash video tutorials. Their knowledgebase is also quite extensive and useful.

Host Gator web hosting has received a 90% and better positive response from their clients. A big part of their success is being easy to reach. Most customers agree that Host Gator is very responsive and helpful, fixing problems easily.

Control Panel

Host Gator employs the industry standard control panel, cPanel. This control panel is one of the best in the industry, and has over 39 scripts that can be installed. It is easy to learn and use, as it provides more than one million end users the ability to install dozens of leading open source programs, accompanied with flash movies for instant tutorials.

Cpanel is the #1 control panel in the world, and for good reason. It streamlines your web management, allowing you to monitor the amount of bandwidth used, space used, create e-mail addresses, sub domains, MySql databases, and more.

Your package will also include Fantastico, the leading auto-installer for cPanel servers. Fantastico is equipped with more than 10,000 installations, and content management systems that a user can integrate into their web space swiftly.

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GoDaddy

admin — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 03:02:40 +0000

GoDaddy

ProsSite builder has Flash support, audio and video players, RSS. Excellent traffic reporting. Good shopping-cart tax and shipping options.

ConsConfusing sign-up has too many options, come-ons. Components poorly integrated. E-mail account provision is stingy. Product logs you out too often.

Bottom LineGoDaddy has a capable online site builder and excellent site stat reporting, but the overall site-creation and management experience is far less intuitive and streamlined than what you get with Microsoft Office Live Small Business and Yahoo! Small Business.

Although it’s probably best known as a huge domain-name registrar, GoDaddy can also help small businesses move online with tools and services like its WebSite Tonight site builder, e-mail account provisioning, search optimization, e-mail marketing, and site-statistic reporting. Patient tinkerers who want to track their Web traffic and fine-tune their sites to improve search-engine rankings will be happy with GoDaddy. The firm certainly offers comprehensive support, but if you want to get your business online as fast and painlessly as possible there are better options.GoDaddy’s site gets high marks for security (Firefox’s location bar indicatesthe highest level of encryption and verification), but not for layout. The home page has to

be one of the busiest, most confusing on the Web, overloaded with offers, prices, menu choices, and text and image links. Although it’s possible to find what you need, the plethora of choices is a good indication of what to expect if you sign up for GoDaddy’s services.

I looked at GoDaddy’s New Business solution, the closest competitor to the base business-site plans of Yahoo! Small Business (YSB; $11.95 monthly or $134.43 yearly) and Microsoft Office Live Small Business (OLSB; free the first year with 500MB storage and $14.95 per year after that). At $159.93 per year, GoDaddy’s entry-level offering isn’t actually a bargain compared with the competition, despite all the splashy special-offer promotions on its site.

Getting Started

For your fee, you get a domain name with private registration, WebSite Tonight (WST) page-building and hosting, Traffic Facts reporting, and Traffic Blazer Deluxe site-promotion tools. The Business Starter plan provides 2GB of storage, lets you transfer 100GB of data, and lets you build a maximum of ten pages. The last seems restrictive, given that services like OLSB and YSB let you add all the pages that fit in your allotted storage. GoDaddy also sells other business-related packages. E-mail Users gives company-branded e-mail addresses, group calendars, and folders. The Domain Buyers service lets individuals park domains to save them for later use, or, more likely, to gouge those who need them for real business. eCommerce Sites is for selling online with shopping carts.

After you sign up, you have to come up with a domain name that isn’t taken. The search tool that helps with this is limited compared with those of Register.com and even the Microsoft and Yahoo! challengers. To close the deal on your new domain, you’ll have to wade through a blizzard of other offers. When you finally get to your shopping cart, the annoyance level drops a bit, but not completely. GoDaddy provides one nice touch, though—it uses Domains By Proxy to register your domain; your true registration info remains private, helping to prevent spam flooding the address you use to register.

When you log in to your account, you get a page that’s nearly identical to the busy home page non–account holders see, except that the My Account choice has working links. The My Account page itself is as dizzying as the rest of the site. Choose the WebSite Tonight link to visit the online Web-page builder. If you don’t want to finish building your whole site in the same session, you can get back to it later via the WebSite Tonight home page, a portal that shows pages you’re working on, top help articles, and thermometer-style controls that display your storage and data transfer usage. Next to these are strategically placed upgrade buttons in case you’re reaching account limits.

You have to click on use credit to take advantage of WebSite Tonight or any other features included in your subscription—an annoying extra step the better-integrated OLSB and YSB! don’t require. Using a wizard, you enter site settings, then choose and customize a design. After selecting one of your domains to use, you must create another username/password combination for that domain—another sign of the offerings’ lack of integration.

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FatCow Web Hosting

admin — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 02:53:01 +0000

FatCow Web Hosting

Introduction

FatCow recently redesigned its webpage. Previously, it had a poor interface, but its new website is a big improvement over the old one. Plans and information can now be easily accessed using a clearer interface. However, it isn’t always the home page that makes your buying decision, it is their level of support, features and reliability. With FatCow, they fail to meet those criterion.

Price and Cost Effectiveness

FatCow provides Miva Merchant on all web hosting accounts, but their web hosting accounts start at $13.96. Miva Merchant, is the most popular and powerful e-commerce shopping cart software for websites. It not only provides users with an easy to use configuration tool, it also allows the merchant to easily setup an online store in just a few hours. A unique feature of FatCow hosting packages is that it includes the option of adding multiple domains into a account for a nominal charge. This itself is a huge cost savings especially if you host several domains.

Websitesource Reliability

With FatCow, our testing website was up most of the time, however, during periods of time when the site was down, we had a difficult time contacting technical support. Technical support would not answer the phone and this was during both peak and non-peak hours. We were wondering if this company even provides tech support. We also sent them an email to confirm our problem and it took a few days before we received a proper response. Overall, the service has been reliable, but the tech support has not.

Websitesource Data Center

FatCow is fully connected via redundant connection to Qwest, GTE and GlobalCenter. These are all tier 1 providers, and since they have redundant connection, if one or two of these providers go down, your website hosted on their machines would remain up.

Websitesource Customer Relations

Customer relations need major work. So far our contact with customer service has been poor. Null responses and no phone call pickups make this company’s support possibly the worst in the industry. Even though they claim to offer 24/7 Chat support and sales, they fail to show up when we access those features. To make matters worst, we were told that they would be available in a minute, but instead they never showed up even after an hour.

Control Panel

FatCow uses a proprietary control panel made by 4siteinternet. Much to our surprise, it comes loaded with a huge number of features and the navigation menus were easy to understand and use. Icons are created for each features in the control panel and easy to access help information are next to each feature.

Conclusion

FatCow offers reliable service and great control panel .But the non-existent support team and sales team hurt the company. Without support, who would even need a web hosting company.

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InMotion Web Hosting

admin — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:11:49 +0000

InMotion Web Hosting

Introduction of InMotion Web Hosting

Founded in 2001, InMotion Hosting is one of the most popular business hosting providers in the industry. Their focus on providing businesses with reliable, scalable and expertly supported hosting solutions has established them as a “go-to” solutions provider and accounts for why so many of their clients recommend their services. Their “A” rating from the Better Business Bureau reflects their commitment to excellent customer service and their industry-leading 90 money back guarantee backs up that commitment.

Pricing & Cost Effectiveness of InMotion Hosting

While many other hosting companies cut prices in an attempt to grab market share, a noticeable decline in the level of support and service also follows. InMotion Hosting refuses to follow this trend and instead focuses on making outstanding customer service their #1 goal. InMotion Hosting may not be the lowest cost provider, however, the saying “You get what you pay for” rings true.

Their Business Class hosting packages begin at $7.95/mo with an annual commitment & $6.95 with a 24 month commitment. Their pricing is still quite affordable and well worth the few extra dollars that you might save by choosing a lower cost alternative.

Important Features for Businesses

InMotion Hosting offers a multitude of scalable hosting solutions to fit your needs. Unlike the competition who tend to offer a one-size-fits-all hosting solution, InMotion Hosting offers a full range of shared, virtual private server (VPS) and dedicated server packages. Your business website will have plenty of room to grow with InMotion Hosting.

Their Business Class, VPS & Dedicated packages also use 100% commercial grade Dell™ servers which utilize higher-end hardware resulting in an up to 50% increase in speed and exceptional reliability. They also provide nightly data backups of accounts up to 10GB in size and one account restore every four months at no additional cost.

InMotion Web Hosting Customer Relations

InMotion Hosting’s customer service is very good compared to other web hosts. Their entire support staff is U.S. based and made up completely by in-house employees. They never outsource their support to cut costs. They provide true 24×7 support via toll-free phone, chat, email or ticket support. Hold times average less than 2 minutes and their staff is incredibly knowledgeable and helpful. InMotion also provides a 90 day money back guarantee, which is longer than the average guarantee in the industry, as well as a 100% any-time satisfaction guarantee.

InMotion Hosting Features & Control Panel Design

InMotion web hosting uses the latest CPanel control panel and provides access to Fantastico scripts for easy installation of blogging software, content management systems, wikis and customer service tools. They also provide a full featured web builder that makes creating your site quick & easy.

Conclusion

Considering their outstanding support, reliability and robust features, we are pleased to recommend InMotion Hosting and we feel they are a great choice, particularly for businesses. Besides web hosting, they also offer a plethora of other web hosting solutions that will cater to the needs of every business including dedicated servers, virtual private servers, and website design services.

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EasyCGI Web Hosting

admin — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 02:38:45 +0000

EasyCGI Web Hosting

Introduction

Easy CGI has a superior intuitive site, which provide potential clients with easier access to ordering information. They also offer the most unique product offerings. They offer Coldfusion, ASP, and even the new ASP.net technologies. Besides web hosting they also offer co-location, which shows that they are no small player.

If you need Windows 2000 hosting, the average provider will charge you around $20 or more per month with a setup fee. Easy CGI is an exception to that, with Windows 2000 hosting accounts starting at $7.96 per month. It comes with 3 GB of space and 50 GB of traffic. For storage, we have not found a company offering more. For Windows web hosting, Easy CGI is a very solid choice.

Price and Cost Effectiveness

Easy CGI was founded in 1998 and located in New York. Over the years, they have expanded their product offerings. They offer the most comprehensive Windows web hosting package we have ever seen. Their packages all come with ASP, MS Access and access to a shared ssl certificate. Plus they were the first company we have seen to offer ASP.net to the public. They also offer plenty of flexibility to their web hosting plans. You can add MsSQL and Coldfusion at any time.

Control Panel

One of the greatest weaknesses in this company is their control panel. Easy CGI’s control panel is very limited in what it is able to do. For one, it lacks much of the advanced features that are otherwise found in other control panels such as web creation tools, setting directories as CGI readable, etc. Their control panel is very basic, in that it only includes mailbox editing, and billing information. Rather than using a professional control panel software package with lots of features, they decided to make their own which is very basic. However, if you do not plan to use a control panel, then this should not matter. It does have all the basic functions, just nothing more and the interface needs some tweaking.

Data Center

We were unable to obtain much information about their date center. We do know though that they operate a data center and it is located in the same building as their corporate headquarters. This means they can easily solve problems if they were to occur

Customer Relations

EasyCGI has improved their customer service dramatically over the past few years. With their vast years of experience in the industry, all of their service professionals have sufficient knowledge in the products they sell. You can ask them anything about the packages and they will answer promptly without hesitation. When we asked about Windows web hosting including version numbers of software and whether or not it would support our Windows ASP application, they were able to provide competent answers. EasyCGI also provides extended support hours from 9 to 5 six days a week.

Conclusion

All in all, Easy CGI is a viable web hosting provider. It offers everything one would expect in web hosting company. Even though they have a much weaker control panel than most web hosting companies, they offer consumers a great value in web hosting and they have above average technical support. They are definitely a choice to consider when you are seeking for a Windows web hosting provider or if you need a lot of storage space.

76%

Rating Out Of Ten
Performance	7
Reliability	8
Customer Relations	8
Features	9
Control Panel	4

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JustHost Web Hosting

admin — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 01:39:35 +0000

JustHost Web Hosting

Introduction of Just Host

JustHost is relatively new web hosting company but it is run by web hosting veterans and it is the third choice on our list only because they are new and there isn’t a long track record. But based on customer reviews and comments left by our users they were extremely impressed by their level of customer service, ease of use of services, and spectacular uptime. What distinguishes them from many other web hosting companies is there relatively large number of services that their parent company operates which integrates well with their web hosting.

Pricing & Cost Effectiveness of JustHost.com

At $4.95 per month with only a one year commitment makes their web hosting reasonably priced and if you want 6 months it is only $5.95. For two year and three year membership, they are only $3.95 per month. There are no setup fees. However, free domain registration is only provided for annual or higher memberships. Do not be fooled by their cheap prices because $3.95 is the cheapest price we have for web hosting on our reviews, their service and server speed rivals that of Lunarpages, Bluehost and Hostmonster. The $3.95 rate is a rate to induce new customers to try their service out. It is similar to the promotion offered several years ago by 1&1 Internet services which gave everyone two years of free web hosting for signing up. Now they have become one of the largest web hosts in the world because of a lot of those users ended up renewing.

JustHost Customer Support

Customer service offered by Justhost has been superb. Calls were all answered in a prompt manner and the technicians were very prompt in responding to our inquires both over the telephone and online. They also took their time to explain step by step in transferring our domain name, uploading files and explain to us the technical aspects of the web server. Well rounded customer service is what is commonly seeked in a web hosting company, but often times we get transferred from one representative to another technician because each one is a specialty person or does not want to take the responsibility of handling the customers concern.

Design and Ease of Use of Control Panel

JustHost utilizes the latest version of Cpanel for their users. Their interface of Cpanel also has been modified for improved ease of use which is what we enjoy. With just a few clicks we can setup image gallery, joomla and numerous of other applications. They offer plenty of other applications which we don’t find with other web hosts which is why we like Justhost so much. Anyone without any scripting experience should find it easier to use the features here.

Conclusion – Editor’s Choice for Web Hosting

Justhost.com is the premier web hosting company for all of your basic needs. Their plethora of scripts, ease of use of the control panel, fantastic customer service and good price makes it a optimal choice for your web hosting needs. For only $3.95 per month with free domain name for life for two or more years of web hosting is a good way to lock in the rate for several years. We rarely found a web host with such competitive pricing that provides such great hosting reliability and customer service.
http://www.justhost.com/

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HostMonster Web Hosting

admin — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 12:02:59 +0000

HostMonster Web Hosting

Introduction of Host Monster

HostMonster offers one simple unique web hosting package starting at $4.95 (for a limited time only). With the package, they are offering unlimited storage space and traffic and unlimited domains. In this type of web host, you would expect subpar service and reliability. However, that is not the case with HostMonster. They not only offer superb service. Service that is only matched by our number one choice Bluehost, but they have top of the line performance for websites hosted on their server. They put fewer users on each server than other web hosts and they have the latest options on their servers including PHP5

Pricing & Cost Effectiveness of Host Monster

In many ways Host Monster is similar to our first choice for web hosts, but instead of focusing on businesses they focus more on the end user. Their website is more user friendly and the control panel (They use Cpanel) is slightly friendlier. Pricing of $4.95 is very competitive in the industry. Their regular rate is $5.95 per month for one year. Most web hosts do not offer the array of features such as the Fantastico Suite, SSH and PHP5 for this cost. Looking at Network Solutions, they do not even offer the service that Host Monster offers but they charge at least twice as much as Host Monster with a two year prepayment. Host Monster also permits you to cancel at anytime without any fee.

Monster Host Customer Relations

Superb Customer service and fantastic response time is what separates Host Monster from the rest of the pack. The response to trouble tickets are phenomenal. We submitted a trouble ticket at 10:40 Eastern Time and a response came in at 10:48. If you don’t call that fast I don’t know what is. Even before we reviewed Host Monster, the average response time for a trouble ticket was two hours and we were already impressed by that. A phone call also took less than a minute before we were connected. When we called we were the first person in line and this was at different time intervals during the day. We tried night, morning, afternoon, and late afternoon. They also do not outsource their tech support, so all of their employees are here in America. They are very fluent in programming and hosting and you will not have any trouble understanding them. To reach their tech support, you can call 1-866-573-Host or 8665734678. They are open 24 hours.

Design and Ease of Use of Control Panel

Host Monster utilizes Cpanel for their web hosting. There control panel uses the default templates, but all of the features have been enabled including SSH. All the features like adding email addresses and deleting subdomains tend to be faster with Host Monster than other web hosts. Execution took only seconds when we added and removed hundreds of domains and email addresses during our test.

Conclusion – Editor’s Choice for Web Hosting

HostMonster is our second editor’s choice for the best web hosting company. Their ease of use, customer service, and high retention rate of past customers prove HostMonster cares about their clients and they will do whatever they can to ensure a maximum level of satisfaction.

http://www.hostmonster.com/

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Bluehost Web Hosting

admin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 11:46:45 +0000

Bluehost Web Hosting

Introduction of Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the internet’s most experienced personal and business web hosting companies on the internet. According to our latest survey and comments from our past readers, their web hosting offers the most consistent performance especially during peak time. While other web hosts that we reviewed are slower during the day, they are always consistent with their speed. Bluehost also has extremely knowledgeable and friendly staffs that are willing to assist you even if they are the simplest of problems. We called when we didn’t now how to use FrontPage to upload a site and when we linked the pictures using the wrong path name. While the other web hosting companies refused to help claiming it was too technical Bluehost assisted us. For the second year in the row, Bluehost has been recommended as our top choice for web hosting because of their commitment to quality support, superior uptime, fast performance, and massive features that comes preloaded into our accounts.

Pricing & Cost Effectiveness of Bluehost

Bluehost currently charges $3.95 per year for web hosting if you prepay for 2 years and $4.95 if you prepay for 1 year with free setup and domain name. While other web hosting companies have lowered their pricing, Bluehost has always had the same price since they started as a web hosting company. It is how they are able to keep the quality of their hosting high, while other companies have lowered the quality of their web hosting because they rather focus on increasing the quantity of customers they have rather than on the quality of their web hosting. The pricing is very competitive in the industry because it covers the cost of the domain name and a lot of features are included such as the Fantastico suite and E-Commerce shopping cart and Blog software. The pricing also includes 24 hours technical support 7 days a week which is better than all of the hosts we have reviewed.

Bluehost Customer Relations

The customer service we have received from Bluehost has been exceptional. Whenever we called support whether it was at 3:00 AM at night or 12:00 PM in the afternoon, we were always able to get a hold of a technician while holding for less than a minute. The staffs were also very knowledgeable and they were always able to assist us from simple questions to high complex questions. They were very straight to the point. They even assisted us in setting up a Message Forums script when we had over fifteen questions on trying to install the software. Overall, we the company is very well managed considering the level of support we received for the little money that we paid monthly for their web hosting.

Bluehost Features & Control Panel Design

Bluehost utilizes the latest version of Cpanel in their web hosting with the plenty of software add-ons including Fantastico. This software is a graphical user interface tool that makes managing a website a piece of cake. They include a plethora of scripts from blog to chat to help desk, which can all be installed with a click of a button. The CPanel isn’t just the standard setup, but it is a fully loaded Cpanel with a lot of Add-on software. A value added feature is Telnet access, which is included free with their web hosting. A lot of business web hosting companies usually charge for this feature.

Conclusion – Editor’s Choice for Web Hosting

All in All, Bluehost is the best choice web hosting for your business and your personal needs. They offer a plethora of software that makes building a website a cinch, plus their support staff is one of the most knowledgeable in the industry. They also have the highest reliability rating of any web host, and their web hosting performance is top notch. For the second year in a row, Bluehost reigns over the competition and received the highest recommendation of a web hosting service.

Another bluehost web hosting review

http://www.bluehost.com

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DreamHost Review

admin — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 11:40:07 +0000

DreamHost Review

I had a site that took up quite a bit of space and even more bandwidth, and basically nothing else. I needed a host that could support it (for cheap) and I found DreamHost. DreamHost gives you an insanely huge amount of space and bandwidth for not very much money. I signed up with them and so far, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

First impression of DreamHost is “Wow, this is a lot of space and bandwidth, for cheap.” Note: after this review was written, disk space and bandwidth have gone to unlimited. Once you navigate through DreamHost.com’s slightly 2000-esque web site that’s kind of hard to navigate, you’ll find out that it’s true.

For $8.95 per month, you can get “unlimited” storage and “unlimited” Terabytes of bandwidth (per month). The resource quotas also increase by 160 MB (storage) and 8 GB (bandwidth), weekly. Many other features (email, domains/subdomains, MySQL, FTP, etc.) are also unlimited. Their plans do have a $49.95 setup fee, but it’s not that big of a deal if you intend to keep your site simple. Setup is waived if you pay for one year or more.

DreamHost’s activation process is somewhat clunky and definitely not streamlined. Though the actual process is simple for a customer, when you throw in the free domain registration (included with most accounts), prepare your inbox! I think by the time I was up and running, they had sent me about 10 emails with various information about billing, passwords, control panels, and what not. Once you digest all of it, it does make sense and is helpful, but it’s not streamlined. It doesn’t taken very long for you to get up and running so DreamHost can be forgiven.

By far my least favorite thing about them is their control panel. It has the basics and a few nice extra features, but it’s clunky and difficult to figure out right away. The terminology is different than what a lot of web hosts use, but once you figure it out, it isn’t too bad. I’d definitely pick cPanel over this, but you can’t always pick. From their control panel you can view and manage all of your billing, domains, usage details, pre-installed scripts, emails, users, and all of that jazz. There’s a few nice addons like an ad-free version of DreamBook (a fancy guestbook application), a nifty affiliate system dubbed “Rewards” that lets you create your own promo codes and decide your payout, and quite a few other things.

Uptime and support has been good enough. For my simple needs, I only had to contact DreamHost once and I received a reply within a few hours. Uptime hasn’t been bad at all (I haven’t noticed any downtime, but I don’t pro-actively monitor it). All in all, DreamHost is great for a simple site that isn’t mission critical.

Pros: lots of space and bandwidth, cheap, some nifty addon features, awesome affiliate program
Cons: clunky control panel, lack of good statistics programs, phone support is limited to certain amount of calls per month, only shared hosting (no reseller or dedicated)
Bottomline: For a simple site that needs lots space and bandwidth, and not much else, DreamHost is probably as good as it gets.
Rating:

Visit DreamHost.com