TheyThought

This information is fresh from October 24th 2007.
Note: This page contains no Affiliate Links nor do we get credit in any other way from the companies listed here.

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We have collected information on several prominent web hosting companies, five of which we have had the pleasure (or discomfort) of working with directly. Collecting honest 1st-hand reviews was not trivial due to the unbelievable amount of fake reviews that exist.

Exec Summary

When looking into buying a web hosting package, use these rules of thumb:

• Buy hosting with a hosting company, and buy a domain name from a registrar.
• Avoid Review sites that are affiliated with the top chosen companies.
• If it’s too good to be true, then it isn’t. No one can allow for hundreds of sites to have endless bandwidth/storage/CPU for a buck a month.

This is a summary of the information we found, with our own 2 cents of experience along side.

Rank	Name	TheyThought	WeThought
1		Great uptime, Great price, Reliable, Reasonable support.	Reliable, Solid shared hosting outfit.
2		Good performance, Reliable	This site is run on HostGator currently.
3		Not much - good or bad.	A bit less than reasonable uptime, No money-back guarantee option.
4		Spammers and too many billing issues here.	OK performance, Bad Support, Anti-user control panel.
5		This is the smaller, bit-cheaper alternative to BlueHost	N/A
6		Downtime seems to be an issue.	N/A
7		Hard to find Yahoo-Hosting Fans out there.	Slow, Restrictive (only allows TCP port 80 out of server), Expensive
8		Too many angry faces !	N/A

Detailed Review

The web hosting business is a rapidly growing and evolving business. There are hundreds of millions of top-level domain names and websites out there, making the domain-name registration and web hosting business a multi billion dollar market.

Web hosting companies provide a service for hosting personal or commercial website and online applications, renting their computation and networking resources as well as technical support and guidance. Every eCommerce site, small and large, is most likely run from some hosting company’s data center.

There are 3 basic types of hosting packages:

Shared	Your site runs a computer and shares its resources with tens or even hundreds of other sites.
Virtual	A chunk of the machines resources are virtually allocated to you and full control over that space is at your hands. Still this is only virtually true.
Dedicated	You own 100% of the machine’s resources. For more web hosting terms see: wikipedia, WHIR, aplus.

The list of companies we sought opinions about:
• Yahoo Small Business
• Bluehost
• 1and1
• HostGator
• Parcom.net
• AnHosting
• HostMonster
• LunarPages

More leading brands not covered in this item:
• StartLogic
• PowWeb
• iPowerWeb
• Web.com

1and1

Cons	Pros
Unreliable service. here	Some say they do have good customer support. here
Many spammers on 1and1. here	Speed
Many people had billing issues with them. one, two, three, four.
Canceling to be a soft spot for 1and1. here

BlueHost

Cons	Pros
Support congestion vbulletin.	Bluehost fans: one, two, three, four
The October 22nd outage. here and there	Bluehost working behind the scenes. Electricpolitics
	Control over your site and content. starting-an-internet-business.com
	99.9% uptime. WireFan
	We actually thought this speaks positively about the Bluehost support. here
	Rjfrancisco likes the Bluehsot support. here

HostGator

Cons	Pros
Database and load issues. here	General positive things: One, two, three
Site suspension surprises. here	Reliable here and here
	Performance

Yahoo Small Business

Cons	Pros
No cpanel, MySQL confusion. See DigitalPoint	Practically nothing !
Poor Performance, Poor Support, Expensive. See SitePoint
Wordpress trouble, More MySQL trouble. See WebHostingTalk
Terrible support, Downtime. See RealSoftware
Wordpress trouble, Customer support trouble. See WordPress

Parcom

Information on this hosting company is scarce - good or bad. Our personal experience with them has been ok aside for two things: price (relative to features) and uptime (about 97% according to our experience).

AnHosting / Midphase

Information on this hosting company is scarce.
There seems to be some talk about downtime, e.g. here, here and here. A somewhat vanilla review is here.

HostMonster

Cons	Pros
Cpu limitations. here	Fans: here and here
Bad Customer support and poor performance. here and here	Cheap and convenient payments. here

LunarPages

Epinions.com has a review list here on LunarPages. Most opinions there are outdated from 2005 and back.

Cons	Pros
An angry one. here and here	A happy one here
No J2EE here
Bad customer support here
performance issues here
Trouble with getting commissions
Lunar tricks here and here and here
Bad Feelings here
Spam here

Here’s a quick poll on web hosting, on the DigitalPoint forum:

Unfortunately the way this poll is run is misleading since the companies’ share is the market is not the equal, making it more likely that the larger companies will have more unsatisfied customers.

A grain of salt: How to properly read online reviews on web hosting packages.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Low Cost, Web Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.