the hostorian (& his reviews!)

One.Com

Hostorian — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:14:55 +0000

One.com Web Hosting Ratings

Not recommended by the Hostorian!
Click here to visit One.com.

Or click here to see the recommended shared web hosting companies instead.

Summary

One.com have been in business since 2002, and have helped host Fortune 100 corporations, private resellers, and more. With 160,000 satisfied customers, they have become one of the most reliable hosting companies to date. They include all the services you could possibly want when hosting a website, big or small.

Quick Facts About One.Com

One.com was founded in 2002, and now has 700,000 customers in 149 countries.
One.com is based out of Denmark
Web Hosting Services: Small Plan ($1.45/month), Medium Plan ($3.00), Large Plan ($5.65)
Phone: +45 4690 7100

Products and Services by One.com

One.com has a very straight forward site which will get you started with a website in a matter of minutes. There are no major decisions to make and no confusing hosting options. There are only three plans, and the only difference between them is the hard drive size.

All plans include the following: unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, a photo gallery, web editor, blog, FTP, and a daily backup. All applications appear to be custom-made applications, not well known options like WordPress. There also doesn’t appear to be a content management system option available (meaning no Joomla, Drupal, etc).

The Small hosting plan is $1.45/month, Medium Plan is $3.00/month, and Large Plan is $5.65/month.

Hostorian’s Review of One.com

One.com’s Performance

One.com lists a 99.9% guarantee for uptime with their servers. There is a 15 day money back guarantee for their hosting services, but not domain name registration.

One.com’s Features

The feature list with One.com is small in comparison to most hosting companies. One.com is really looking to capture the beginner market in the world and does not make things complicated at all. All applications are custom built which means there is no support available outside of One.com. This also means you can not add some blog designs you may see or plugins for WordPress, etc. There is a “live demo” on the website, but it is nothing more than some pictures. The website they list as the demo site is only a photo gallery.

Support and Customer Care by One.com

Support for One.com is as basic as their hosting services, but does include live chat, phone, or email support. There are some basic FAQs to help you get your website up and running, as well as, setting up your email accounts through Outlook or other email client.

Pros

Offers the cheapest rates available on the Internet for hosting.
Easy to choose the right hosting plan to use.

Cons

All applications are custom made, so no support for 3rd party applications.
Very limited options for support of the custom applications.
Customers routinely point out the shady billing practise.

Actual Customer Reviews for One.com

“I can only agree with the previous reviewer – avoid one.com at all costs. I too am having to deal with their aggressive and completely anti-social cancellation policy: any other provider would take the lapsed renewal as a cancellation of service – not these cowboys, they insist on charging a full year’s extra cost. ” – Frank Bramwell

“Avoid one.com like the plague! they have disgraceful policies on automatically updating subscriptions and send minimal correspondence. I cancelled my subscription but due to it being after 10month and 5 days of a 12month subscription i was locked until 2011! I didn’t pay the fees as i was trying to rectify the situation with the admin team. And they sent the debt to a third party debt collection firm so in three months a bill of £19 went to £48!!! ” – Steve Davies

“It is impossible to keep track of the billing procedure at one.com. You can’t manage multiple domain accounts together so it is pretty difficult to make sure you pay on time. Why do you need to make sure? Because they only let you pay one year at a time, and if you don’t respond to the only email they send, it goes straight to a collection agency and you have 3-5x the original bill.” – Anonymous

Verdict of this One.com Review

For someone looking to start up a website who has no previous knowledge of HTML, blogging, email, etc. One.com may be a good option for them. This site is really geared towards people who do not want a lot of options with their website. It is perfect for people who want to share their photos online or have a basic blog without getting too complicated.

For anyone else looking for a professional site, this is not the place for you. It is cheap, but there is no easy way to add WordPress, Joomla, etc. to your domain. Other hosting companies offer a lot more options when customizing your hosting package and make it dead simple to install advanced software.

I was feeling more enthusiastic about One.com until I read the customer reviews. Too many of the customers were complaining that their credit cards were automatically charged for renewal when they were not wanting to continue the service. More worrisome is how the unpaid bills went straight to a collection agency after a few weeks, not several months as is standard practice. One.com is routinely voted as one of the lowest rated hosting companies out there, so I would advise against using the site until there are more positive reviews.

Click here to go to One.com’s official website.

Or click here to see other top rated shared web hosting companies instead.

Omnis Network

Hostorian — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 06:31:42 +0000

Omnis Network Hosting Ratings

An excellent web host — highly recommended!
Click here to visit Omnis Network’s website

Apply the coupon code host20 to get 20% discount on your Web Hosting purchase!

Summary

Omnis Network Hosting is a fairly large hosting company, having over 200,000 accounts using their services. They have been offering their services for a long time, since 1999, and have built their business by offering comprehensive services surrounded by great support.

Quick Facts About Omnis Network Hosting

Omnis has been in operation since 1999, and have won several awards for Best Support and Editor’s Choice for Web Hosting.
Are serving over 200,000 accounts
Hosting Plans: 12 months ($6.95/month), 24 months ($5.95/month)
Phone: 877-393-4678

Products and Services by Omnis Network Hosting

With Omnis Network Hosting, you do have a lot of the features other hosting sites have, but there is no tiered pricing for business users. Pricing is dependent on the length of the contract. For 12 months, the hosting plan is $6.95/month, and then that price drops a $1.00/month for 24 months ($5.95). Pricing for a Windows-based hosting plan start at $8.95/month and drops to $7.95/month for a 24 month plan.

With the hosting package, you receive: a free domain for life (with a year or longer package), unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, host unlimited domains, 24/7 support, online help, and have access to free installation scripts to install the best online software available (including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and more).

Hostorian’s Review of Omnis Network Web Hosting

Omnis Network’s Performance

Omnis Network Hosting offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, with 24/7 network monitoring, UPS power backup, and courtesy site backups, plus a 30 day money-back guarantee.

Omnis Network’s Features

The standard features are available at Omnis Network Hosting, such as one click install for popular software. From blogs (WordPress, b2evolution, Nucleus), Content Management Systems (Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Movable Type, Xoops), eCommerce (CubeCart, Zen Cart, Open Cart), and much more. They also offer free site promotion tools, a free SiteBuilder with templates, and advertising credits for Yahoo ($25) and Google AdWords ($50).

You also have access to their Design services (receive a free quote with an account), and can register a domain name with pricing from $8.95 for a .com domain, $7.95 for a .net or .org domain, to $14.95 for a .co.uk, with many more options for discounts for mass registrations.

Support and Customer Care by Omnis Network

Support for Omnis Network Solutions is much better than a lot of the other hosting companies out there.

They offer 24/7 phone support, a live chat system, a knowledge base, and video tutorials. The knowledge base has several hundred articles available to read that include How To’s, FAQ’s, and common problems. The video tutorials are not as comprehensive as the knowledge base, but do offer the basic topics, including how to install WordPress or another installation script.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away, plus $75 worth of advertising coupons to market the site.
A very good rate for unlimited domains, space, and bandwidth, and can cancel at any time.
Over 10 years of hosting experience, and highly recommended by users.

Cons

Only one hosting package available, no room for upgrades.
No other services available apart from cloud hosting.
Some customers noted issues in previous years of their services being slowed because they were using too much space (20+ GB).

Actual Customer Reviews for Omnis Network Hosting

“Had several domains with another provider. Wasn’t happy with that provider for various reasons, but always hesitated to move my accounts because of the hassle. But when they had a server go down that actually lost some data and accounts, that was the final straw. Found Omnis and tried one account with them. There service was good and solid, so decided to move everything over to them. The tech support was great and helped move all my domains over and consolidate them on one account using their link accounts tool. Just had to contact my old registrar and get the auth code to transfer the domains to Omnis and where to input the auth code. A lot simpler than I thought it was going to be. Will be keeping my accounts with Omnis for a long time.” - Mike Cole

“I have shared hosting with dedicated IP, unlimited/unlimited. I’m running WordPress with MySQL. My website’s performance is surprisingly good. I had the exact same setup at another web hosting company, but the performance was awful. Site crashed a few times, and their support never gave me specific answers. Support at Omnis is much more reliable. I have to give Omnis credit. Good job.” - Peter Robertson

“Wow what great service. I’ve been using Omnis for my web hosting, and the service has been outstanding. When I had some problems with my email early on, I contacted their tech support. Easy to reach, and friendly to talk to. We were able to get things fixed really fast. Its great to have such quality staff providing support. Everything has been working perfectly since. Its been two years now. Omnis is the best! “ - risingstargolfacademy.com

Verdict of this Omnis Network Review

Omnis Network Hosting is an excellent option for a site that is small in stature. I would not recommend it for a site that aims to host a lot of photographs or streaming audio/video due to the comments made by some users of their site being slowed because of using too much space. Omnis seems like the ideal solution for someone wanting to set up a blog or an eCommerce website.

I am not fond of sites that only have one hosting plan available and you pay dependent on the length of your contract. This is good for people who own an established, small business, because it is likely the website will be used for at least 24 months. For someone who is just starting up a blog and is noncommittal about the length, it is not an attractive offer. Of course, committing to a plan of over six months will make you commit to publishing to a site regularly.

I did not find any negative comments about Omnis Network Hosting from the past year. There are some from early 2009 and earlier that warned of the sites being slowed down, but this should not be an issue for the majority of the users. Most of the users have only raved about the support they received from the technicians at Omnis.

Omnis Network Hosting is an attractive option for web hosting for an advanced user or a beginner who is willing to commit to a service. With excellent support and great features available to the hosting plan, Omnis Network Hosting is highly regarded. I will rank them highly and give them a 4.5/5 stars.

Click here to visit Omnis Network Hosting’s official website.

Omnis Network Hosting Discount Coupon Code!

Apply the coupon code host20 to get 20% discount on your Web Hosting purchase!
Click here to visit Omnis Network Hosting’s official website.

Network Solutions

Hostorian — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:28:30 +0000

Network Solutions Ratings

Looks good overall, though a bit pricey, and has some negative reviews. Caution!
Click here to visit Network Solutions

Or click here to see the recommended shared web hosting companies instead.

Summary

Network Solutions have been in business for a very long time now, and have compiled a large suite of services to offer their clients, from hosting plans to designing websites. Navigating this large assortment of options can be a challenge, and the prices are a bit higher than other hosting sites. Overall, they appear to be a hit and miss company depending on the person using the services.

Quick Facts About Network Solutions

Network Solutions hosting was founded in 1979, hosting websites since 1995.
Web Hosting Services: Shared (Small) Plan ($9.29/month), Shared (Large) Plan ($12.41/month), Shared Unlimited Plan ($27.18).
Phone: 1-800-361-5712

Products and Services by Network Solutions

Trying to find the best hosting option available on Network Solutions proves to be a bit of a challenge. They have three different tiers for shared hosting, and the prices change depending on how long you are willing to pre-pay for the service.

The Small Shared Hosting plan starts at $9.29/month for a year contract, and with that you receive: 300 GB of hard drive space, 3000 GB of bandwidth, a free domain name, and 1000 email accounts.

The Large Shared Hosting plan is $12.41/month and gives you the following upgrades: 500 GB of space, 5000 GB of bandwidth, 2500 email accounts, but only the one domain name.

The Unlimited Plan is $27.18/month and gives you: Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited hard drive space, 3 domain names, and unlimited amount of email accounts.

Slightly confusing is that Network Solutions offers an additional plan for WordPress blog hosting. This plan starts at $4.13/month for a year contract, and gives you: 50 GB of hard drive space, 500 GB of bandwidth, one free domain name, and online marketing credits to help advertise your website. This is a steal of a deal for people just starting off with blogging.

In addition to the Shared Hosting plans and the WordPress hosting plans, Network Solutions has a wide assortment of services available: domain name registration ($35.00 without a hosting plan), website design, eCommerce websites, online marketing services, and various packages of services to get your website started. For example, their WebAddress Basic package is $34.99/year and includes one web page, domain name, and an email account. This option is only viable for people wanting to create niche mini-sites or need a landing page for an affiliate link.

Hostorian’s Review of Network Solutions

Network Solutions’ Performance

Network Solutions Hosting offers a 99.99% guarantee for uptime, plus a 30 day limited money-back guarantee.

Network Solutions’ Features

All plans contain the features that are becoming standard across all hosting companies. They include different options for blogging (WordPress, b2evolution, BlogEngine.net), Content Management Systems (Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, DotNetNuke), Wikis (TikiWiki, PHPWiki, and ScrewTurn Wiki), Message Forum, eCommerce (Magneto), Project Management, and more.

Support and Customer Care by Network Solutions

Support for Network Solutions Hosting has almost as many options as their hosting packages. They offer free 24/7 phone and email support, 365 days a year. They also have a series of video tutorials, user guides, support forum, knowledge base, getting started guides, and a domain maintenance guide. If you need assistance doing anything website related, you can find it on this site.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
Plenty of hosting options available to find the perfect solution for your site.
Offers a lot of services to help your website and business succeed.

Cons

Domain name registrations are expensive compared to the competition.
Site is overly complicated in setting up a website.
Plenty of negative reviews out there, including complaints of the support staff being located overseas.

Actual Customer Reviews for Network Solutions

“Absolute worst email service I have experienced (and I have been around since email was invented . Constantly battling to simply log on to the site. Constantly tossed off for no apparent reason. Horribly slow response time. Doesn’t work with Internet explorer. Doesn’t scroll properly on my iPhone. I could go on and on but I refuse to let Network Solutions ruin another morning for me!” - NS User

“I have been with Network Solutions for over 10 years…I have NEVER had any problems with Customer Service…it has been fantastic…I have NEVER had my two sites go down…I have NEVER had any issues with the email packages…I have NEVER had ANY problems with image cafe…
I believe the negative reviews are not valid…nor do I think they are written my true NS customers…I have been with NS TOO long know what’s what…
Cmon people…get a grip…
Network Solutions has been nothing but FANTASTIC to me and my two sites…” - Mooosie2

“Used to be great. Not too sure recently. Customer service now offshore and hard to understand and not very responsive. After two days of inoperative email and no resolution to the matter, as well as inconstant information, I am seriously considering a change. to my email and web hosting.” - Fred Carmean

Verdict of this Network Solutions Review

Network Solutions looks like a company that has a lot going for it if you judge it from looking at the website alone. It can be tricky to navigate and to find exactly what you are looking for. Sometimes having too many options is not a good thing when it comes to site design packages.

The prices are a bit high when looking at domain registration or the basic shared hosting accounts, but the WordPress Blog Hosting prices look like a great deal. I would highly recommend checking this site out for your hosting needs, except some of the customer reviews raise red flags for me. Some of the problems were for large sites, but people do not seem to have much luck when it comes to their email services or the customer support. Some complained about the support being overseas help after the office hours had finished and had problems communicating effectively with the support staff. Others complained of their site going down completely and services being canceled.

That being said, all the negative reviews were balanced by positive reviews. I am not sure which way to lean in terms of recommending this hosting company, so I would advise in backing up all your data along the way to ensure your site remains secure and portable to another option if problems arise.

Click here to go to the official Network Solutions website.

Nethosting

Hostorian — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 14:11:47 +0000

Nethosting Web Hosting Ratings

Seems to be a good web host overall, would be worth a try
Click here to visit Nethosting’s official website

Summary

NetHosting is a company that specializes in the hosting your websites, without offering the suite of applications available at other larger sites. Their primary business is through dedicated and virtual hosting, giving the power of the site’s operation completely to the customer. Servers are completely upgradable to your specifications allowing you to build the server you need.

Quick Facts About NetHosting

NetHosting was been in operation since 1994, based out of Orem,UT.
Hosting Services: Dedicated ($99.00/month and up), Virtual Private Server ($24.95 per month and up), Virtual Hosting ($7.95/month and up)
Phone: 888-534-4678

Products and Services by Nethosting

NetHosting is a different company from the other hosting sites out there in that they focus on dedicated server accounts. They give the customer the power to setup their server in the way they would like them to be, whether that is the hard drive size or the memory available or the operating system. For the Mark I v2 dedicated service, the starting package comes with 1 GB of RAM, 500 GB of hard drive space, an Intel 1.8 Ghz processor, and your choice of CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, or Windows as an operating system. You can upgrade the memory up to 8 GB, hard drive up to a terabyte, but the processor is not upgradable.

The Virtual Private Server is a cheaper alternative to the dedicated solution, but has limitations with the service it can provide. The VPS 128 comes with 128 MB of RAM, 5 GB of space, CentOS, and only 50 GB of data transfer. These options are only upgradable by purchasing a higher tiered plan, which nearly double in price.

The Virtual Hosting offers 10 GB of space, 100 GB of transfer, and gives you the ability to host an unlimited amount of domain names. The options to add applications to this service are extremely limited. They only offer support for adding WordPress, MediaWiki, OsCommerce, CubeCart, PHPBB, and PHPShop. The service is not amateur friendly.

Hostorian’s Review of Nethosting

Nethosting’s Performance

NetHosting offers a 100% guarantee for uptime through redundant systems. You can get your money back for any services that you have paid for but have not used yet (if pre-paying for the year), but there are no 30 day money-back guarantees.

Nethosting’s Features

Features are extremely limited for the virtual hosting plans. Apart from what is mentioned above, they do offer full POP3 email support, the ability to host an unlimited number of email accounts and setup IMAP accounts. They do support all the major scripting languages, and offer unlimited number of FTP accounts.

Support and Customer Care by Nethosting

Support for NetHosting has a few options available: there is live 24/7 chat, phone support, and an email ticket system. There are a limited amount of FAQs and articles mainly about setting up your server, but no articles about setting up WordPress, for example.

Pros

Offers great choices to customize your server to get your website operational right away.
Affordable hosting plans for small to mid-size businesses.
24/7 support is available through different channels

Cons

Very limited options in adding applications easily to your virtual servers.
Not enough actual customer reviews available to backup NetHosting’s claims.

Actual Customer Reviews for Nethosting

“Nethosting is a great company to work with. Their service is top of the line and my website has never been down. Pricing is good, give them a call and they will always work with you on the price. Used them for almost 2 years now and I’ve never had a problem” - John

“The pricing looks excellent. Sadly, we are based in the UK, so the exchange rate with the dollar is making it more expensive than it would usually be. Also, there are often time of day issues with support between here and the US, and also some speed and congestion issues during busy trans-atlantic periods.” - Terry, Conveyancing Manager, UK

“It’s one thing to experience an instance of exceptional quality of service and out-of-this-world customer satisfaction when doing business with a company; it’s another to experience this with the unmatched dedication and consistency that is Nethosting. That is why I’ve done business with them for over thirteen years. They are more than a vendor; they are my technology partner.” - J. Pedroza, owner, Strüdelhosen Design

Verdict of this Nethosting Review

It is extremely difficult to accurately gauge what NetHosting brings to the table because there are no easily accessible reviews available online. With other hosting companies, it is easy to find relatively accurate accounts of the user experience, whether it is good or bad, and be able to compare NetHosting’s claims to the actual experience.

NetHosting claims to have 100% uptime with their services, and offer stellar support through chat, email, and by the phone. Without the user experience, there is no way to verify this information. I can say that they offer a variety of options when setting up your server, and the virtual hosting plans are comparable to other sites, except for the lack of a full suite of applications to install. NetHosting only offers eight different applications to easily install. On other hosting sites, there are eight different applications in the blogging section alone. This is the one major drawback towards NetHosting for people who are just beginning to setup a website. For professionals who are comfortable working within a file manager to upload and install their software, it will not be a major concern.

For professionals who are looking for a place to set up their website, NetHosting appears to be a good option for them. The prices are reasonable, the options to upgrade the server is powerful, and there is support around the clock available to you. I do advise you to look at their policies posted on the website to make sure you are comfortable with their terms before you build your website.

NetHosting is definitely worth a look, and based on the few customer reviews that are available they do seem to be a good web hosting company for dedicated servers and virtual servers hosting.

Click here to visit Nethosting’s official website.

Netfirms Web Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 07:32:42 +0000

Netfirms Web Hosting Ratings

Not recommended if you want to host a website for the long term!
Click here to visit the Netfirms website

Or click here to see the recommended shared web hosting companies instead.

Summary

Netfirms is a hosting company that has been around for several years. They have received press in journals such as New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and ComputerWorld. Their customer reviews are mainly negative, however, so the services may have changed dramatically since the newspaper coverage.

Quick Facts About Netfirms

Netfirms hosting was founded in 1998.
Web Hosting Services: Plus Plan ($4.95/month), Advantage Plan ($9.95), Business Plan ($9.95).
Phone: 1-866-317-4678

Products and Services by Netfirms

Netfirms has three tiers of hosting plans available to choose from. They have the Plus Plans which start at $4.95/month, Advantage Plan ($9.95/month), and Business Plan ($9.95/month).

The Plus Plan comes with 10 GB of space, 500 GB of bandwidth, hosting for one domain only, 10 email accounts and access to several quick install applications.

The Advantage Plan increases the disk space to 250 GB, 2,000 GB of bandwidth, 2 free domains, hosting for an unlimited amount of domains, and 500 email accounts.

The Business Plan increases the disk space to 300 GB, 3,000 GB of bandwidth, 5 free domains, 1000 email accounts, plus all the standard features available to the other accounts.

Hostorian’s Review of Netfirms Web Hosting Service

Netfirms’ Performance

Netfirms does not mention a guarantee for uptime, but does offer a 30 day money back guarantee if you are not happy with the services. Customer reviews pointed out that their sites were down frequently, but those reviews were from previous years. Nothing current has mentioned any issues with the hosting servers.

Netfirms’ Features

All plans contain the features that are becoming standard across all hosting companies. For the Plus Plan, you are able to install WordPress, and PicturePro Photo Gallery. The other plans support those two applications, as well as, Drupal, Joomla, Zen Cart, and PHPBB Discussion Forum. In the features list, the site mentions that they include NetFirms AppsUniverse which are easy to install applications. Plus Plan includes the Silver level, Advantage is Gold, and Business is Platinum. No other information was able to be found in regards to what applications are included at each level apart from the ones mentioned above.

The Plans also include advertising credits for Google Adwords and Facebook Ads. Plus Plan includes $25 worth of credit for each, while Advantage and Business include $50 for each service.

Support and Customer Care by Netfirms

Support for Netfirms is fairly comprehensive. They offer free 24/7 phone and email support, 365 days a year. They also have live chat during business hours. In addition, they have a series of flash tutorials, user guides, support forum, knowledge base, getting started guides, and a domain maintenance guide. If you need assistance doing anything website related, you can find it on this site.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
Cheap Hosting plan with the Business Plans when you include the cost of five free domains
Support is always available online and includes some good tutorials.

Cons

Lack of information about available software to install
No guarantee for the server uptime
Custom designed control panel can be slow

Actual Customer Reviews for Netfirms

“Netfirms had me up and running with a Website and Blog in literally minutes. Servers were fast, setup was easy. Whats really cool is their Grid Hosting feature which I understand they were amongst the first to develop. I bought the Netfirms Business hosting plan which includes toll-free customer service, 5 free domains and Windows and Unix hosting features all one on plan. I used their support services to get help on domain transfers and spoke to a friendly rep who pointed me to the right spot on the control panel. To top it all off, the included 5 free domain name registrations are free for as long as you host with the Netfirms Business plan. I moved 3 domains over using the Control Panel. I give them a 9/10 for overall value. “ - Chris M

“Their customer service is beyond horrible. They do not respond to support emails for literally DAYS and it takes, seriously, an hour and a half to get someone on the phone. Once you have someone, they will put you back on hold for 10 minutes or longer while they search for the answer. Unfortunately, after you’ve spent all that time talking to them they do not follow through with their promises to fix the problem.
We have had nothing but bad experiences with them and it is likely that we will not receive a refund for the hosting non-service, nor for the days wasted attempting to get a satisfactory resolution to our issues.” - Russ Miller

“I have been using Netfirms for about 2 years now, with no problems that I can remember. I have about 30 domains with them and 15 web sites. (The rest of the domains are either parked or multiple names point to one website.) It all works easily. Their control panel is unique to them, but you can do what you need. The few times I called support I was talking to a person in a few minutes who actually knew what they were talking about.” - Alex

Verdict of this Netfirms Review

At first glance, Netfirms looks like a great option for people to use when starting up a website. The Plus package is very reasonable for a beginner blogger who is just starting to build up some reliable traffic to the website, but only if they don’t think they will need support. Registering a domain name is priced similar to other sites. The Business Plan is a steal at the price they are offering when you include the five free domains. It is definitely the plan to go with for professionals.

Problems begin to arise when you delve deeper into the customer reviews of the site. There are not too many performance issues as far as the servers being down, but there are a lot of issues with shifty behaviour by the company, including several mentions of credit card fraud. Several people have mentioned that support calls were delayed and took a long time. That is troubling considering that Netfirms says that all support staff undergo a rigorous training regiment before working.

The site seems like a reasonable place to register your domains and may be cheaper in comparison to some sites. Hosting a site here may cause you problems. Several other websites rank Netfirms at the lower end of the scale when lined up against the other hosting companies.

If you are looking to host a website for the longterm, I would suggest using a different service that is not as much of a gamble as netfirms appears to be.

Click here to go to the official Netfirms website.

Or click here to see other top rated shared web hosting companies instead.

Lunarpages

Hostorian — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:54:02 +0000

Lunarpages Web Hosting Ratings

A good web host if you are starting out, not otherwise!
Click here to visit the Lunarpages website

Or click here to see other recommended web hosting companies instead.

Summary

Lunarpages have been in business for quite a long time, and have helped host Fortune 100 corporations, private resellers, and more. With 160,000 satisfied customers, they have become one of the most reliable hosting companies to date. They include all the services you could possibly want when hosting a website, big or small.

Quick Facts About Lunarpages

Lunarpages was founded in 1998, and now has 160,000 customers.
Datacenters in Irvine and San Diego,CA, Las Vegas,NV and several satellites locations in the United States.
Web Hosting Services: Starter Plan ($3.95/month), Basic Plan ($4.95), Business Plan ($18.95)
Phone: 877-586-2772

Products and Services by Lunarpages

When you first visit the website, you are placed in front of a wall of different offers and services to choose from. It can be rather confusing at first glance compared to other hosting sites, but you can find any solution that you may be looking for, from a basic blog to eCommerce site to VPS hosting.

The Starter plan is a cheap hosting option priced at $3.95/month. With the low price, comes limited features as the storage is only 5 GB, 50 GB of bandwidth, and the only support option is by email, not phone. This option is great for someone who knows what they’re doing and needs a space to develop the look and feel of a website in a live environment, but definitely not suited for someone who may want assistance in the development of a website.

The Basic hosting plan is $4.95/month, has unlimited storage and bandwidth, includes 24/7/365 phone support, and a free domain name. It also comes with $110 worth of advertising credits for MySpace, Facebook, and Google AdWords. The Business hosting plan is $18.95/month, includes everything the Basic plan has, plus 3 domain names. It also includes some features a business may be interested in, including Tremmendesk hosted Help Desk, 3 months of unlimited backup through KeepIt!, and a dedicated IP.

Hostorian’s Review of Lunarpages Web Hosting

Lunarpages’ Performance

Lunarpages offers a 99.9% guarantee for uptime, plus a 30 day money-back guarantee. They also have tape backups, and 24/7/365 server monitoring.

Lunarpages’ Features

All plans come with over 30 web scripts to install software, which include the popular options of WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, ZenCart, and osCommerce. They also include a package worth $700 of free software or coupons that help you design a logo, get customer feedback, and more.

There is also the ability to register a domain name (if it’s not included with your hosting package), but the prices are rather expensive. I did a search for a .com domain which are $19.95 at Lunarpages, and $11.00 at GoDaddy. If you need a domain to include with your package, use a different service.

Support and Customer Care by Lunarpages

Support for Lunarpages has almost as many options as their hosting packages. They offer free 24/7 support, 365 days a year through email, and phone (except for Starter packages). They also have a series of FAQs, a Glossary of terms, Online Tutorials, Knowledge Base, a Wiki, forums, and a ticket system.

In addition, they also monitor the servers 24/7/365.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
Cheap Hosting plans make it affordable for amateurs
Business Plan offers some great add-on features, like the Help Desk.

Cons

Starter package does not include phone support
Registering a domain name is expensive.
Customers routinely ranked the customer service levels as poor.

Actual Customer Reviews for Lunarpages

“I’ve been with Lunarpages for some time now. Prices were great and support were great also.
It used to be that their prices were always the most competitive that you wouldn’t think twice about signing with other hosting company. Now the great price and great offers are mainly for the new accounts while accounts like mine are getting hit with increased prices each year. I asked on their forum page as to why the price increase while others are much lower, I get a response of “Times are changing”.
Support used to be great on the forum and also submitting tickets. Now when you post questions in the forum, you don’t get the same quality of support. It seems like they have more forum moderators than knowledgeable support staff. At least submitting support ticket is still fast and reliable.” - lostchild368

“My previous host was not so good. Lunarpages had great special for two year plan. I must say I’ve saved good money and the hosting has been rock solid, fast, and as I’ve had no issues with service can only say when I caused an htaccess error due to some sloppy ftp handling and brought down all sites – they got back to me in no time and politely informed me of cause of issue and quick fix. I fixed the file and voila, all better. I’ve begun implementing all sorts of php etc. and have five sites now, still rock solid! Super Host, am very pleased!” - satisfiedincny

“Lunar pages is the worst company I have ever dealt with. I have had countless issues with their utterly horrible customer support both via email and phone. They have now taken to “hiding” any complaints and issues about their service on their forums. You can only see the issues customers are posting about if you have made an “account” and have at least 10 posts to your name. This is an obvious attempt to hide the growing number of issues with their service from potential customers viewing their forum.” - Mike

Verdict of this Lunarpages Review

At first glance, Lunarpages looks like a great option for people to use when starting up a website. The Starter package is very reasonable for a beginner blogger who is just starting to build up some reliable traffic to the website, but only if they don’t think they will need support. Registering a domain name is rather expensive compared to other sites, but if money is no object, than it won’t be an issue.

Problems begin to arise when you delve deeper into the customer reviews of the site. There are not too many performance issues as far as the servers being down, but there are a lot of issues with shifty behavior by the company and by poor customer service. Several people have mentioned that the support center is located outside of the US, and is so large, you never deal with the same person twice. They end up wasting a lot of time repeating themselves over and over again.

Another issue that has come up is the site or account being locked out because of “suspicious behavior” which is actually fairly common – for example, checking an IMAP email account from a desktop and mobile on the same wifi network. Having the same IP address send duplicate IMAP requests raises a red flag for the system.

Hosting a small site on Lunarpages seems to be the ideal situation to be in while dealing with the company. If you plan on hosting a major site that will be using a lot of processing power, or have a lot of bandwidth usage, Lunarpages is not a great option for you. The only reason to use this service is for their Starter package to get a site up and running quickly. Otherwise, I would suggest finding a better alternative.

Rolling all of the above into a number, I would only rate this company a 3/5 and warn people to be extremely cautious with what they do with their website.

Click here to visit the official Lunarpages website.

Livedrive

Hostorian — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 06:37:10 +0000

Livedrive Online Backup & File Storage — Reviews and Ratings

Livedrive looks like a great service from what they offer, but fails to fully deliver.
Click here to visit Livedrive’s official website

Summary

Livedrive is an online backup solution for your data residing on your computer, but offers a bunch of different options in accessing your data. It works seamlessly in the background doing all the work for you, keeping your data in the cloud in a secure environment. Compatible with Mac and PC, it is an affordable solution to backing up your computer data.

Quick Facts About Livedrive

Livedrive has been in operation since 2008.
Pricing: Backup ($6.95month or $59.98/year) or Backup & Briefcase ($16.95/month or $153.95/year)
Contact: questions@livedrivesupport.com

Products and Services by Livedrive

The statistics are quite staggering when it comes to data loss. 43% of people lose irreplaceable files every year, only 3 out of every 100 laptops stolen are recovered, and up to 13% of hard drives fail in their first year. Livedrive has come along and developed a service to save that data before you lose it. Their software sits on your computer and uploads all or select files to their servers in a secure manner. They offer two different plans, a plain Backup solution, and the Backup & Briefcase option which gives you some added features.

The Backup plan starts at $6.95/month or $59.98 for the year if you pre-pay. With the service, you get unlimited storage space, unlimited bandwidth to access your files, unlimited transfer speed (no caps on upload/download speeds if you have a high-speed internet connection), and you can install the software on any number of computers. After you install the software and do the initial backup, you will be able to log into the website to view the files like you would if they were on your desktop. The added bonus is that not only can you see the files, you can view the content of them, too (photos, videos, play music, and display Office documents). Livedrive has also developed an iPhone/iPod App that gives you the same accessibility as logging into the online account. It allows you to stream music to your iPhone/iPod or view the photos. There is also a Blackberry application.

With the Backup & Briefcase option, you get everything mentioned earlier, plus a few added features. You can install the software on any number of computers, but each computer can access the same Briefcase. This allows you to synchronize your work files with your computer at home or with your work laptop so you can see the files while traveling. There is also the ability to edit the documents or photos through the web browser. This is a handy feature for text documents if you need to update some notes. You also have the ability to share your documents with anyone by sending a private link to the file on the servers. No need to worry about the size of that email attachment. Put it on Livedrive and send the link for people to download.

Hostorian’s Review of Livedrive

Livedrive’s Performance

Livedrive offers two options to try out the software.

There is a 14 day trial which gives you the opportunity to try out both the Backup & Briefcase options. There are no restrictions of usage besides the two week trial timeline.

The other option is to purchase a plan, and then have a 30 day money-back guarantee if you aren’t satisfied.

The only difference between the two is the purchase plan is cheaper if you do decide to continue with the service. After the 14 day trial if you want to continue, you get charged the full price of the plan.

Livedrive does not take up too much computer memory when in operation, and you have the option to limit the bandwidth usage. With the backups, Livedrive will do one automatically when the program is first started up, but you can schedule one daily at a certain time if you like leaving the program open and running. Livedrive does do backups of their servers on a daily basis in case something happens to fail on their end.

Pros

Offers a solution to backup your computers without concern for bandwidth usage or storage space
Works for PC or Mac
Ability to view files through website or iPhone/iPod

Cons

Customers mention frequent data corruptions
Desktop client can run slowly
Poor to no customer support – only available by email, no phone, live chat, or forums.

Actual Customer Reviews of Livedrive

“You can’t make a genuine assessment of Livedrive’s service in 1 week, let alone within their 30 day trial period. Slowly but surely, severe flaws start to become apparent. As each build of the client would come out once a month (if we were lucky), it would take 2 steps forward and then 3 back. The basic functionality of being able to reliably backup my library became worse and worse. Checksum errors, file corruption, uploads that take forever, files that upload over and over again, I could go on and on. Once you run their client for a while and start looking behind the fancy interface to verify whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, you find out that you’ve been ripped off. After 6-1/2 months of pure frustration, I finally got a refund. Your mileage may vary.” - Bruce

“DONT USE LIVEDRIVE. Why?
1. No Support Response
2. Files get corrupted
3. Files get lost
4. Desktop Client is unusable on slower pcs (i.e.. netbooks)
5. Livedrive does not guarantee for the files. if your files get lost due to hardware issue at livedrive.com they are gone forever.
6. Livedrive lies on their customers (i.e. they say they use encryption, actually the DO NOT)
7Livedrive staff can look at your data.
8. Livedrive can ban you any time and without prior warning and without violating the ToS
9. FTP does not work consistently
and so on and so on…” - Brethil

“I’ve seen mention issues of corrupted files and data. This is something I pointed out would happen, as their backend software has difficulty in assigning storage properly through their very poorly implemented database.
Encryption? Not a hope! Their servers weren’t (aren’t?) powerful enough to deal with it, so it didn’t (doesn’t?) happen. They had not even worked out how to separate peoples accounts securely. I’m pretty sure that given a few hours and an account I could hack between peoples accounts and get some juicy data from them. I’m just not prepared to pay for the account to do it!” - Ed

Verdict of this Livedrive Review

Livedrive looks like a great service from what they offer, but fails to fully deliver if the user complaints are to be believed. The Desktop client for the Mac does run a bit slow, but it is only a Technical Preview and will improve in time. Getting everything setup on the computer is painless, and it starts to synchronize immediately after you select which folders to backup. The files were available as soon as they were marked as complete, too. One flaw with the synchronization process that I came across was that it only sends one file at a time, making a very slow first time process if you have more than a hundred files to backup.

If Livedrive was a free service to use, it would be well worth trying out as it is easy to use. If you are operating a business and want to backup some important files, there may be a better service available to you. This is all being judged by only seeing some rather negative comments about the service and hardly any good comments from longterm users. All short term reviewers were thrilled with the service. I especially like the iPod application, myself.

If you only need the ability to backup a small number of files, a service like DropBox will suit you just fine. The reviews of Livedrive make me too cautious with using their services for real important data. It may be best suited for music and videos if you want to sync it between multiple computers. I will rate it a 3.5 out of 5.

Click here to go to Livedrive’s official website.

IX Web Hosting

Hostorian — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:42:27 +0000

IX Web Hosting Ratings

An excellent web host — highly recommended!
Click here to visit IX Web Hosting’s website

Summary

ix Web hosting has been in business for just over ten years, and they show their love for customers in several ways. They have a great support system for clients, have specials happening throughout the year, and offer a free 7 day trial, plus a 30 day money-back guarantee after those first seven days. They have a lot of other services to offer beyond a hosting account, allowing you to find the ideal product for your site.

Quick Facts About IX Web Hosting

ix Web hosting was founded in 1999, has 110,000 clients, and hosts 470,000 sites.
Web Hosting Services: Expert Plan ($3.95/month), Unlimited Pro Plan ($7.95), Business Plan ($7.95).
Phone: 800-385-0450

Products and Services by IX Web Hosting

ix Web Hosting has three hosting plans available. The Expert Plan is priced at $3.95/month, Unlimited at $7.95, and Business at $7.95.

All three plans include unlimited amount of domain names to host, unlimited bandwidth, and an unlimited amount of storage space. That is simply outstanding pricing for the Expert Plan, but it gets even better. It includes a free domain name registration (3 for Unlimited, and 2 for Business Plus). The main differences between the hosting plans occurs with the amount of MySQL databases and their capacities, and the amount of email accounts and the inbox storage. With the Unlimited Pro account, you receive 10 GB of space to host an unlimited amount of email accounts. The Unlimited Pro account is accurate when it says it’s unlimited.

Hostorian’s Review of IX Web Hosting

IX Web Hosting’s Performance

ix Web Hosting offers a 99.9% guarantee for uptime, plus a 30 day money-back guarantee for all hosting plans.

In addition, there is a free 7 day trial available, and your credit card is not charged until after those seven days have expired. They also offer UPS Power/Back-up Generator, Firewall protection, 24/7 server monitoring service, and a spam filter.

IX Web Hosting’s Features

All hosting plans come with the ability to install different web software, forums, blogs, online shops, and CMS. Unfortunately, they do not include a list of the software that is available to install. There is also free web templates to use, an online web editor, full multimedia support (Flash, streaming audio, streaming video), and full support for all major scripting languages.

Support and Customer Care by IX Web Hosting

Support for ix Web Hosting comes in four different flavours: 24/7 phone support, 24/7 ticket system, live chat during business hours, and a catalogue of video tutorials.

Topics for the videos vary from setting up an email client for your account, transferring your domain, and setting up WordPress, amongst others. They are all very informative and easy to understand.

Something a bit different about ix Web Hosting is that they assign you a Support Hero, someone you get to know over the length of your hosting contract that can help you out with all your issues. I thought this is a nice touch, because the support person would have first-hand knowledge of any previous issues you have had.

Pros

Great pricing with lots of features included.
Personal Support person assigned to handle your account.
Great reviews from current clients.

Cons

No clear list of software available to install
A few customers noted downtimes, but ix Web Hosting is open about their issues over at http://status.ixwebhosting.com

Actual Customer Reviews for IX Web Hosting

“Ix has solved every problem encountered in a professional and timely manner. The support has been great on all matters needing attention. Live support waiting time was very minimal for the few times help was needed and all issues were resolved to my satisfaction.” - Donald Clem

“Generally there were a few issues to start but I have found that with most hosting companies. Ix have consistently helped me to do things that other hosts just refer you to articles to read.
I don’t usually write reviews but have felt that after reading many reviews that it is only fair to give credit where it is due.” - Trevor L

“I had a problem today and Alexey has assisted me, his support was amazing, professional and friendly. I love the online chat, always get great results and what I most love is that no-one treats me as an idiot even though I have limited knowledge of websites and no knowledge of programming.
Thank you! Alway recommend for others, has been hosting our other businesses for over 5 years with ix.” - Erika

Verdict of this IX Web Hosting Review

ix Web Hosting looks like one of the best kept secrets for hosting companies. They offer a lot, especially if you’re willing to pay the extra dollar a month to get the Unlimited plan, and their prices are extremely low in comparison to some other companies out there. The plans are loaded with features, and has the great option to try out their services risk-free for seven days. That gives you plenty of time to get familiar with the administrative tools and the tutorial videos.

Some customers noted some down times, but after scanning over the status logs that ix Web Hosting posts, some of them are fairly minor, and I have yet to see a duplicate issue. One user suggested that if your business needed a solid 24/7 uptime that they choose a different hosting solution.

Because of all the positive reviews that I came across on the web, I will have to say ix Web Hosting is one of the best companies available on the web to host your site on. It is rare to come across a company that receives positive comments, is customer service oriented, and has some great web tutorials. ix Web Hosting is highly recommended and gets a rating of 4.5/5.

Click here to go to IX Web Hosting’s official website.

InMotion Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 16:38:57 +0000

Inmotion Hosting Company Ratings

A top rated web host with excellent customer reviews and low prices. Highly recommended!
Click here to visit Inmotion Hosting’s website

Summary

Inmotion hosting has been in business for nearly ten years, and that experience shows in the many awards they have received. They have taken home awards for best hosting company, best dedicated servers, and best support every year from 2005 to the present. They offer quite a few different hosting plans that make sure to cover any of your needs to make the hosting affordable.

Quick Facts About Inmotion Hosting

inmotion hosting was founded in 2001.
Web Hosting Services: Starter Plan ($3.00/month), Basic Plan ($4.00), Max Plan ($5.00). Business Plans starting at $3.95/month.
Phone: 888-321-4678

Products and Services by Inmotion Hosting

inmotion Hosting has two tiers of hosting plans available to choose from. They have the Value Plans which start at $3.00/month, or the business plans that start at $3.95/month. After looking through the options of the plans, the business plans offer a lot more for only a $1.00 more, so that’s what I will highlight below. The best Value Plan hosting option you can get is the Max Plan ($5.00/month), and it offers less than the lowest grade option of the Business plans ($3.95/month), for example.

An important thing to note about these plans before I get into specifics: you do have to prepay for two year’s worth of services when looking at the Value Plans. With the Business Plans, you can order by a monthly, annual, or prepay for multiple years. Value Plans offer a 30 day money back guarantee, whereas Business Plans offer a 90 day money back guarantee.

The Business Plans include everything you could possibly need to get started with any kind of website. The one exception is the Launch Business Plan does not come with any eCart software options (the Max Plan is the only Value Plan that comes with them). With the Power and Pro Business Plans, you get those features included. The Launch Business Plan comes with 6 domains, and that scales up to unlimited domains with the Pro Business plan. The Launch Business Plan also only comes with two MySQL databases. Enough to host one blog, but not enough to do much more than that. Otherwise, all three business plans come fully stacked with features.

Hostorian’s Review of Inmotion Hosting

Inmotion Hosting’s Performance

inmotion Hosting offers a 99.9% guarantee for uptime, plus a 30 day money-back guarantee for Value Plans and 90 day money-back guarantee for Business Plans.

They also offer daily backups with the Business plan, or weekly with the Value packages. There is the usual 24/7 server monitoring.

Something different about inmotion Hosting is the added feature of Max Speed Zones. Sites are hosted in one of two datacenters (one on the East coast, one on the West coast of USA) that help speed up downloads. They have a test setup to download a file from each datacenter to see which is fastest for your connection. I’m located on the West coast, and both files came in at around the same speed. This may make a difference with larger files, and especially streaming audio or video, but I could not test that feature out.

Inmotion Hosting’s Features

All business plans contain the features that are becoming standard across all hosting companies.

They include different options for blogging (WordPress, b2evolution, Nucleus, geeklog), plugins (web calendar, forum software, Joomla, Mambo), support for the major scripting services, and the Power and Pro Business plans come with support for eCarts (OsCommerce, ZenCart, CubeCart). The Business plans also come with a free new domain, or a free transfer from a different host.

Support and Customer Care by Inmotion Hosting

Support for inmotion Hosting has almost as many options as their hosting packages.

They offer free 24/7 phone and email support, 365 days a year. They also have live chat during business hours. In addition, they have a series of flash tutorials, user guides, support forum, knowledge base, getting started guides, and a domain maintenance guide. If you need assistance doing anything website related, you can find it on this site.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
Cheap Hosting plans with the Value Plans make it affordable for amateurs
Great reviews from current clients.

Cons

All Value plans have to be pre-paid for two year minimum.
Some issues with the migration from a different host to inmotion, but all issues were resolved quickly.

Actual Customer Reviews for Inmotion Hosting

“I am using InMotion business class hosting (shared server) for my web site, and they have been pretty good for me. Their customer service is excellent. I had a complaint about their MySql version, and they offered me right away to switch to another server that had an updated version. Besides that I haven’t had any issues.” - Jeff Patrick

“I signed up with InMotion, and am perfectly happy with how prompt they were in setting me up and getting my sites up and running.
I am a web designer, and I construct my own sites using professional software, FTP, etc. However, within 12 hours, I successfully transferred my site (which is almost 1 GB in size) to InMotion, and it works flawlessly.
Their prices are excellent, their online support and documentation is tops. They have superb Flash tutorials, and you have extensive access to web analysis info about your site. Couldn’t be happier.” - Elliott

“We have dedicated servers with inmotion hosting as a web design and development company and thus so far we have had a few issues with support but that is to be expected in any technologic arena. They are fairly supportive and promote but any one using a hosting company should keep in mind this is what they do best. Do not expect them to configure websites or files for you or upload software to support your websites even if it may be a server software, this is your responsibility.
Even though everything has not be perfect with inmotion hosting, needless to say things do happen and this is something we should all keep in mind. We have leased servers from other companies and I can truly say my experience with Inmotion Hosting has been far better then my past experiences.” - Adam Kanji

Verdict of this Inmotion Hosting Review

inmotion Hosting looks like one of the best kept secrets for hosting companies. They offer a lot, especially if you’re willing to pay the extra dollar a month to get the Business plans, and their prices are extremely low in comparison to some other companies out there. All the major software that you may want is included with the plans, allowing you to get your website operational quickly.

The only downside comes with the Value Plans, since you have to commit to them for two years ahead of time. You do have a 30 day money-back guarantee, but that may not be enough time to fully judge the service for yourself. The Business plans come with a 90 day money-back guarantee, which does protect your interests. That being said, the customer reviews have been stellar, and no one has mentioned any significant downtime apart from server maintenance or a routine restart of a server.

Because of all the positive reviews that I came across on the web, I will have to say inmotion Hosting is one of the best companies available on the web to host your site on. It is rare to come across a company that receives positive comments about the server uptime to support to the features available. inmotion Hosting is highly recommended and gets a rating of 4.5/5.

Click here to go to Inmotion Hosting’s website.

ImHosted Web Hosting Company

Hostorian — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 07:16:06 +0000

ImHosted Web Hosting Ratings

A poorly rated web host. Not recommended!
Click here to visit ImHosted’s website

Or click here to see other top rated shared web hosting companies instead.

Summary

ImHosted appears to have been a great company that has slowly gone downhill. They claim to serve customers in 78 countries, and their Facebook fan page has nearly 4,000 fans, but no current reviews of the company could be found. Their prices are reasonable, but there are better options out there.

Quick Facts About ImHosted

imhosted serves customers in 78 countries.
imhosted data servers are located in Dallas, TX and Atlanta, GA.
Web Hosting Services: Simple Plan ($4.95/month), Power Plan ($9.95/month) – plus a 30 day money-back guarantee.
Phone: (877) 777-0744

Products and Services by ImHosted

The Simple Plan ($4.95/month, $3.95/month if prepaid for a year) offers the most basic service. You receive 10 GB of space, 100 GB of bandwidth, but you’re only able to host one domain. With the Power Plan ($9.95/month, $7.95/month if prepaid for a year), you get unlimited domains, bandwidth, and hosting space.

In addition, you receive 110+ one-click install scripts (including WordPress, b2evolution, Joomla, Drupal, CubeCart, ZenCart, etc.), unlimited email and ftp accounts, a full suite of web statistics, direct server access, and much more.

Hostorian’s Review of ImHosted

ImHosted’s Performance

imhosted offers a 99.98% guarantee for uptime, and 100% customer satisfaction.

ImHosted’s Features

In addition to the usual features included in a hosting plan, imhosted also provides you with a one year subscription to MegaTemplate.com ($60 value), and $215 value in ad credit coupons with services like Yahoo and Miva. The services also include a professional web design tool, and the use of cPanel to control your server.

Support and Customer Care by ImHosted

Support for imhosted comes in many options, including 24/7 phone support, a ticket system, extensive knowledge base, and flash video tutorials. Some of the answers given in the knowledge base are fairly brief, but the video tutorials were quite instructive in nature.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
Extensive knowledge base and flash tutorials
Reasonably priced, and well worth it if you prepay for a year.

Cons

No real upgrade between the two service packages apart from unlimited domains and bandwidth.
Poor customer reviews, but all reviews are dated from 2009 and earlier.
No good reviews for customer support.

Actual Customer Reviews for ImHosted

“I would think twice about this host. I canceled right away as their support sucked. So they refunded my money. Next month I am not their client any more and they billed me anyway. So I asked for a refund. They answered one email and said checking into. No response ever again. And No Refund Ever Came!” - Kevin G

“As a user of this host for over 3 years I can say that this site is incredibly over farmed. My reason for using it was strictly that 3 years ago they offered a competitive price, however, as technology has significantly improved competitors now offer better prices while their price have stayed the same and their servers have become bloated and more and more unreliable. My users constantly complain that they are blocked from my website since Imhosted will block IP addresses indefinitely when their server becomes overloaded and Imhosted keeps these IP blocks secret so that as the owner of a website, I can’t even tell when a user of my website has been blocked. A sorry excuse for a host.” - GSplayer

“Please stay away at all costs! I currently have 2 sites on ImHosted. I asked for an updated release of PHP, as they were still using 4.4.5? on the shared server I was on. All they told me was that they will be updating their servers in a couple of days. Now, my sites have been inaccessible for days. I am not sure what they did, and their support is the worst. They definitely did not upgrade their servers. I have written them and am yet to get any answers.” - Rachel M

Verdict of this ImHosted Review

As mentioned in the summary, imhosted appears to be a company that has lived beyond its life expectancy. The fact that there are no reviews out there for the company that are within a year old, tells me that there aren’t that many new clients coming to the site. In fact, most reviews were from 2005-2007, which is considered ancient in the Internet Age.

Because of all the poor reviews out there were dated from before 2009, I would remain cautious with this company. They claim to have a 99.98% uptime, but on several reports I saw, there were outages at least once a week, if not more. They do offer a 30 day trial of the services, so take advantage of it for a month, but keep track of how often the service is unavailable to protect your future investment.

I can only rate imhosted as a 2.5/5, but may rate higher if there were more recent and positive reviews.

Click here to go to the ImHosted website.

Or click here to see the top rated shared hosting companies instead. (Recommended!)

Host Rocket Web Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:34:56 +0000

Host Papa Web Hosting Ratings

A good web host for professionals, not if you are a beginner. Slightly expensive too.
Click here to visit Host Rocket’s website

Summary

Currently celebrating their 10th year anniversary, Host Rocket is a hosting company specializing in hosting with additional services being an added cost. The company is smaller in size compared to others, but operates its own servers (as opposed to another company maintaining them). Because they host their own servers, downtime is not an issue with customers.

Quick Facts About Host Rocket

Host Rocket has been in operation since 1999, based out of Clifton Park, NY
Are hosting over 50,000 websites
Prices are dependent on length of contract. Start at $11.98/month going down to $5.99 for a 24 month contract.
30 day money-back guarantee.
Phone (US only): 1.866.519.7079, Outside US: 1.518.371.3421

Products and Services by Host Rocket

Host Rocket is definitely geared towards professionals who want complete control of their hosting experience. The services offer unlimited bandwidth, domains, FTP accounts, email accounts, and free site backups through Cpanel. It includes basic software support, such as MySQL, Perl, PHP, and SSH access, but does not include any easy install software solutions.

The hosting services are based upon the length of your contract. It starts off at $11.98/month, then $8.99/month for six month contract, $7.99/month for a 12 month contract, and finally down to $5.99/month for a 2 year plan. The $5.99 price point is slightly higher than other companies, but you do get a lot of value for the price.

They do have a web design service available, but the prices are fairly expensive for someone looking to start their own website. Design services start at $350 for a basic site, $999 for a custom design, and $600 for a content management system (Joomla, Drupal) or a eCommerce Shopping Cart. Even a blog install starts at $150 and that is a fairly straight forward operation.

Hostorian’s Review of Host Rocket

Host Rocket’s Performance

HostMonster offers a 99.5% uptime guarantee, with 24/7 network monitoring, UPS power backup, and courtesy site backups. They control their own servers so any problems are resolved quickly on site. They offer additional remote backup services that cost $5 per backup.

Host Rocket’s Features

There are no additional features that are included in the package other than the ones mentioned above. The other features listed are fairly standard to find (ie web-mail access, web file manager through CPanel, phpMyAdmin, etc).

In order to get a website up and running, you will have to do a lot of the work yourself. If you want to install WordPress or Joomla, you will have to manually upload the files and go through the web installer. There are no free web templates to use, either.

Support and Customer Care by Host Rocket

Support for Host Rocket is rather limited compared to some of the other support systems.

Support is given by 24/7 phone support, live chat, and email. They do have a FAQ/Knowledge base system on their website, but there is no way to input your own questions and there is no community feedback for helpful tips. You rely solely on the knowledge of the technicians at Host Rocket. The questions they answer are fairly diverse, but the answers do not have any videos or screenshots to help guide you through the process.

Pros

Offers unlimited bandwidth, hosting space, domain hosting, email accounts and more.
Servers are controlled by company allowing problems to be resolved quickly
Nearly 10 years of hosting experience to help you succeed.

Cons

Only one hosting package available, price dependent on length of contract.
Additional services offered are expensive.
No quick install software options (WordPress, Joomla) – geared towards professionals.

Actual Customer Reviews for Host Rocket Web Hosting

“As for everyone running professional business on the Internet, resilience is of great importance for me. In the past I have had certain problems with server network availability caused by lack of redundancy. It is difficult to assess the actual character of redundancy promised by hosting providers. But with Host Rocket I hit the nail on the head! I’m not strong in technical specs, and the words “redundant CSS switches” convey little meaning to me. Still I’m greatly satisfied with the performance of my site – and it’s enough to entrust Host Rocket with my further Internet projects.” - Jimmy Wanders

“If you want to resell hosting,I think HostRocket is best.If you think about rate,its really wonderful. But,if you look HostGator,they take $25 for 24 GB Hosting.You never over sell HostGator hosting. But,you can over sell RocketHost hosting.They give you 1000GB WHM reseller hosting!I think it is best in the world.No any company can offer like this.What you think?” - Chris

“saw the review commenting on customer service, and I’d just like to say that the email system of customer support works incredibly well and the guys there – Don is particularly brilliant! – are so good at sorting stuff out, including anticipating where problems might arise and warning me. The phone system isn’t perfect but I’ve never had too much need of it, given the promptness with which the support tickets are dealt with.” - Anonymous

Verdict of this Host Rocket Review

I was a bit surprised when looking over the feature list for Host Rocket and finding it so limited. They do offer a lot for professionals by giving away unlimited bandwidth, hosting space, email accounts, domains, etc. But there are no simple answers for starting up your own web site. The price to pay for their design services to install a blog, for instance, are not worth it when other hosting companies include it in their price or you can find people to do it for free or $5.

That being said, having the company host their own servers allows them to get them up and running quickly if problems do arise. The prices you pay for this service are more expensive than the rest, but if you do commit to a 2 year plan, it will be well worth it.

Based upon the price point and the limited feature set available to people, I can only rank them a 3.5/5, but for people that know what they’re doing, it would be a great company to work with.

Click here to visit Host Rocket’s official web site.

HostPapa Web Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 06:24:03 +0000

Host Papa Web Hosting Ratings

A poorly rated web host. Not recommended!
Click here to visit Host Papa’s website

Or click here to see other top rated shared web hosting companies instead.

Summary

Host Papa is a hosting company powered by 100% renewable energy sources. They focus on offering solutions for small to medium-size businesses. It is easy to make a decision on your hosting solution: just pick a duration for your site.

Quick Facts About Host Papa Web Hosting

Host Papa is based out of Niagara Falls, NY and Oakville, ON in Canada
Majority of customers are not happy with the services.
Web Hosting Services: Price dependent on how long you sign up for. $4.95/month for 3 year contract, $5.95 for 2 years, $6.95 for 1 year.
Phone: 888-959-7272

Products and Services by Host Papa

With Host Papa, you do have a lot of the features other hosting sites have, but there is a catch. With other companies, the hosting packages are tiered, meaning the more you pay, your services are upgraded (more bandwidth, domains, etc.) With Host Papa, the price of the package is dependent on the length of your contract, and you do not receive any upgrades in the services.

With the package, you receive: a free domain for life, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 24/7 email support, online help, and a 30 day money-back guarantee. Pricing starts at $6.95/month for a one year contract, $5.95/month for a two year plan, and $4.95/month for a three year contract.

Hostorian’s Review of Host Papa

Host Papa’s Performance

Host Papa offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, with 24/7 network monitoring, UPS power backup, and a triple redundant firewall protection.

Host Papa’s Features

The standard features are available at Host Papa, such as one click install for popular software (WordPress, Joomla, B2evolution, ZenCart, and more), uses CPanel for FTP control, and unlimited email accounts.

The features that are being offered at Host Papa that may not be available everywhere are ad credits to several services, and a free website builder (SohoLaunch), and hundreds of design templates. The ad credits are for Google Adwords ($25), Yahoo ($25), MySpace ($25), Miva ($25), Ask ($50), and Bidvertiser Advertising Network ($25). That’s a total of $175 of free advertising to get the site off to a great start.

Support and Customer Care by Host Papa

Support for Host Papa is rather limited compared to some of the larger hosting companies. 24/7 support is only available through email, while live chat and phone support is only during regular office hours.

There is a knowledge base available, but the amount of messages in the forum are a tiny fraction of the amount found on the others. They do list free video tutorials, but I was unable to find them easily in their support system.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
Packages offer a lot of features and services for a very low rate (with the 3 year contract).
Powered through green initiatives to help out the environment.

Cons

No added features for longterm commitment.
No 24/7 phone or live chat support.
Very low customer review scores.

Actual Customer Reviews of Host Papa Web Hosting

“Host Papa are ABYSMAL. I’ve just built 4 websites for small businesses, On Monday they were down for 4 HOURS and they’ve been down for a hour this evening…and this is just when I’m trying to work on them…so who knows how often they’re down when I’m not looking. Not the 99% uptime they promise…Online support say “this is a shared hosting it’s bound to happen occasionally” “ - Rowena

“What a selection of idiots. Only a country with such liberal views could allow a shower of incompetents to operate from there. My sites are constantly down (6 times in the last 2 weeks) and even planned maintenance is scheduled wrongly and the given dates are not accurate. I would be interested to hear from Canadians who actually runs Hostpapa. I really think they should start all over again. I suppose if their servers were as efficient as their program for spotting criticism of their sites online then we may not have the problems they do.” - Dissatisfied Brit

“Firstly- I wanted to vote 0 out of 10 but I can’t so my review is 1/10. Don’t bother, no RUN from Host Papa! They are the worst web hosting company on the planet. Our site was down so may times that our customers stated to think we had gone bankrupt! We are in the process of switching to Host Gator and waiting to transfer over completely. In the meantime Host Papa has kindly posted on our webpage that our account has been suspended and we need to contact them immediately for payment!!! LOL, we don’t owe them a penny, we just canceled with them!! “ - DBCL

Verdict of this Host Papa Review

Host Papa is a hosting company that has good intentions with their green initiative, but falls short in terms of performance. They have some interesting ideas in terms of pricing their hosting packages, and it’s nice to see that returning customers get a slight discount with the longer they commit to Host Papa – a common complaint with other hosts. I do think people would prefer the option to boost the performance of their packages, however.

The big problem with Host Papa arises when you do a due diligence report on them. Repeatedly when reviewing the customer review sites, people are ranking Host Papa poorly. The two major complaints are with the customer service, and with the uptime of the servers – the two features that people rely on the most with hosting companies. If it were one or two complaints, it would be easy to overlook, but there are countless amounts of complaints against the company, on different websites, too.

If it were up to me, I would heed the advice of these complainers and not take a chance with Host Papa. I would gladly go with Host Papa other than the larger companies because of their environmental policies, but not until they improve their performance.

Because of the limitations with their services, and the poor reviews, I can only give Host Papa a 2/5.

Click here to visit Host Papa’s official website.

Or click here to see other top rated shared web hosting companies instead.

Hostmonster Web Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 04:32:03 +0000

HostMonster Web Hosting Ratings

A good web host for beginners, not suitable for sites with heavy traffic
Click here to visit HostMonster’s website

Summary

HostMonster is a fairly large hosting company, having over 750,000 websites use their services. They have been offering their services for a long time, since 1996, and have built their business by offering lots of services for a good rate.

Quick Facts About HostMonster Web Hosting

Host Papa has been in operation since 1996
Are hosting over 750,000 domains
No long term contracts, or tiered pricing. A flat rate of $5.95/month, and can cancel at anytime.
Phone: 866-573-4678

Products and Services by HostMonster

With HostMonster, you do have a lot of the features other hosting sites have, but there is a catch. With other companies, the hosting packages are tiered, meaning the more you pay, your services are upgraded (more bandwidth, domains, etc.) With HostMonster, you pay a flat rate of $5.95 a month, and can cancel at anytime.

With the package, you receive: a free domain for life, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, host unlimited domains, 24/7 email support, online help, and have access to free installation scripts to install the best online software available.

Hostorian’s Review of HostMonster Web Hosting

HostMonster’s Performance

HostMonster offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, with 24/7 network monitoring, UPS power backup, and courtesy site backups.

HostMonster’s Features

The standard features are available at HostMonster, such as one click install for popular software. From blogs (WordPress, b2evolution, Nucleus), Content Management Systems (Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo Open Source), Support systems (Helpdesk, Help Center Live), eCommerce (CubeCart, Zen Cart), and much more. They also offer free site promotion tools, a free SiteBuilder with templates, and advertising credits for Yahoo ($25) and Google ($50).

Support and Customer Care by HostMonster

Support for HostMonster is much better than a lot of the other hosting companies out there. They offer 24/7 phone support, a live chat system, a knowledge base, and video tutorials.

The knowledge base has several hundred articles available to read, and there are easily a hundred video tutorials to view.

The tutorials are very straight forward and easy to follow. They also go at a slow enough pace that you could easily watch, change windows, and do, if you wanted. They cover topics from basic (setting up your email client) to more complicated (modifying WordPress installations).

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away, plus advertising coupons to market the site.
A very good rate for unlimited domains, space, and bandwidth, and can cancel at any time.
Nearly 15 years of hosting experience to help you succeed.

Cons

Only one hosting package available, no room for upgrades.
No other services available apart from shared hosting.
Several customers warn about accounts being suspended after surpassing certain metrics (bandwidth, processes, space).

Actual Customer Reviews of HostMonster Web Hosting

“HostMonster is a decent host for the price you pay. It isn’t expensive so you can’t expect as much as you can from the more expensive ones. But it is a great host to start your business up from the ground. After you get enough traffic you can always move up to a better, but more expensive, host. As for uptime I have had no real downtime for the past 8 months.” - minitech.org

“I am with HostMonster for 2 years now and I am think I change it. All my sites are down at least one time every week during the day when the traffic is good. They always have problems with servers or the network. Avoid them and pay a little bit more and get a good host.” - myusedcubagear.com

“Always read fine print. There is no such thing as “unlimited storage and bandwidth.” If you use too much, they will cancel your account on the grounds that “they can cancel you for any reason at any time” even though it contradicts their advertising. That aside, the deal is pretty good. That is, until they have a disk failure and suddenly all your sites are down. You call support and they offer to restore one of the backups they have for you, obviously you say “go ahead.” Then they call back and say “whoops it turns out we didn’t have a backup for you after all.” Now you are stuck uploading your own backup over a household DSL line which will take forever… Local colocation space and servers are cheap these days. Time to move on from HostMonster. I’m done with hosts like this. Beware.” - Anonymous

Verdict of this HostMonster Review

Before reading the customer reviews of HostMonster, I had a positive outlook for the company. They have a wealth of experience with hosting, have over 750,000 domains under their belt, and have a full suite of software options to choose from that can be installed easily. Between the knowledge base and video tutorials, they can help you get any site you would like up and running in no time.

I was disappointed to see that they only offer the one price for hosting services, though. It does make it much easier for newcomers to get started, but a power user will definitely want more with their package than what HostMonster offers. While it is nice to have no longterm commitment, it would be beneficial to have some upgrades available, or a discounted price for using the service for a long time.

Several users left comments noting that their accounts had been suspended after they surpassed bandwidth or space allocation metrics, despite HostMonster’s claim of unlimited bandwidth and space available. For heavy traffic sites, this would be a risk not worth taking, so I would suggest they look for a service that is able to handle high loads of traffic. This hosting company seems to be geared towards someone just starting out and not expecting to have major traffic levels.

With the limitations of the hosting plans, and the user comments, I would be cautious with this company. They do offer a lot of software and other features, however, so I will rate them as a 3.5/5 until I see some more positive reviews.

Click here to go to HostMonster’s official website.

Hostgator

Hostorian — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:15:12 +0000

HostGator Web Hosting Ratings

A top rated web host — highly recommended!
Click here to visit HostGator’s official website

Summary

HostGator is one of the largest, if not the largest, hosting company available to consumers. They boast about having 7,000 servers under their management, which supports the over two million domains hosted by HostGator. Those two million domains account for 1% of the world’s Internet traffic.

Quick Facts About HostGator

HostGator was founded in a dorm room in 2002, and now has 225,000 customers
90% of HostGator customers are happy with the services
Web Hosting Services: Hatchling Plan ($4.95/month), Baby Plan ($7.95), Business Plan ($12.95)
Phone: 800.866.9642867

Products and Services by HostGator

Being one of the most popular hosting companies out there allows HostGator to provide some great deals to the consumers. Their hosting packages include a lot of extras to go with prices slightly higher than other companies. Their Hatchling Package offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth, unlimited sub-domains, unlimited MySQL Databases (for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.), and unlimited email accounts. All that and more for less than $5.00 a month. Their Baby and Business packages upgrade those services to include unlimited domain names, and the Business package includes your own toll-free phone number.

All hosting packages come with a 45 day money back guarantee, $100 credit towards Google Adwords, support for all major coding/scripting languages (Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python), support for three types of shopping cart software (osCommerce, ZenCart, Cube Cart), and use cPanel as the control panel for everything. In addition, they have lots of quick install options for software (for shopping carts, blogs, forums, etc.)

Hostorian’s Review of HostGator Web Hosting

HostGator’s Performance

HostGator offers a 99.9% guarantee for uptime, and also has an automatic weekly off-site data backup for all hosting plans.

HostGator’s Features

HostGator has become one of the best hosting companies by simply offering a lot of value for the price you pay. They do offer a lot with the plans, so here are some more features not mentioned already: they include a free SiteBuilder and SiteStudio website building tools, free website/domain/MySQL/Script transfer from another provider, website statistics, web based file manager, unlimited auto-responders for email, full IMAP support with email, and Spam Assassin to kill off unwanted email before it reaches you.

Support and Customer Care by HostGator

Support for HostGator has almost as many options as their hosting packages. They offer free 24/7 support, 365 days a year with their phone, email, and live chat systems. They also monitor the servers 24/7/365. In addition, there is a online support portal with over 500 videos, and 700+ articles to browse through. You will certainly be able to find an answer in the wealth of information they offer.

Pros

Offers great choices for software to get your website operational right away.
Excellent customer service, and current customers rate it a 5/5.
Offers more bang for your buck than most competition out there.

Cons

No discounts for repeating customers.
Multiple sites/packages are under one account – may be annoying for people operating sites for clients
Slightly more expensive than other sites, but offers more services.

Actual Customer Reviews of HostGator

“I just wanted to write a quick note to let ya’ll (<—Texas slang) know how much I appreciate finally finding a host that has more than enough features for my needs and excellent educational offerings. This is my third host and I haven’t even felt a twinge of that sinking-feeling-what-have-I-done that I felt within a day or so of the other hosts. I have learned so much just from the forums and tutorials! So, thank you to all! I look forward to learning and building my business with you!” - DaniK

“So then, why am I making the change? First, I heard good things about HostGator, and I wanted to consolidate everything. Secondly, the HostGator package is solid and has more to offer. Lastly, and most important of all, is the richness of their customer support. I can get customer support when I want it, how I want it — chat, email, phone. “ - Reb

“Overall, I like HostGator. They are waaaay better than the previous host I had. That company started off great, but got to 60%+ downtime. I never have that problem with HG. My two big hang ups with HG are:
1. new customers get a 20% discount, while loyal customers get nothing except the bill at the end of their term; and
2. no elgg support or hosting on their shared/reseller hosting. Other than that, they are great.” - LC

Verdict of this HostGator Review

HostGator is one of the most referred hosting sites on the Internet today. It is very difficult to miss their banner ads on a lot of blogs. All of this publicity is warranted as HostGator is a very solid hosting company.

With a variety of software options to choose from, you can take your website in any direction you would choose. What helps with that decision is the ability to play around with their catalog of free website templates. You are sure to find something you can work with amongst the 4,500 templates available. If you need assistance in getting that site up and running, the HostGator support staff will help you right away – several reviewers noted wait times of less than half an hour when sending in questions by email. If you would rather try to solve the issue on your own, the video tutorials and knowledge base in the forum will guide you down the right path.

For a newcomer wanting to start a blog, or an experienced pro wanting to host multiple sites, HostGator becomes a great choice for you to use. They are constantly updating their software and servers, offer automatic backups for your security, and make the setup dead simple.

I have not experienced or read many bad things about HostGator, so overall I would rate it a 4.8/5.

Click here to visit HostGator’s official website.

Dotster Web Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 07:01:56 +0000

Dotster Web Hosting Ratings

Not a very good web host!
Click here to visit Dotster’s official website

Summary

Dotster is a hosting company that prides itself on offering a one-stop shopping center for your hosting needs. They are currently managing over 3 million domains, which makes it one of the largest hosting companies in the world. They have built upon relationships with their customer base to add several services to make it more convenient for current and future customers.

Quick Facts About Dotster Web Hosting

Dotster is based out of Vancouver, Washington
Are managing over 3 million domains
Services: Basic ($5.75/month), Deluxe ($8.75), Ultra ($15.99). All packages have discounted rates depending on length of contract.
Phone: 360-449-5800

Products and Services by Dotster

Dotster is impressive with their range of services available to you, covering all of your needs. From domain registration to hosting to offering you design tools for your website or blog, Dotster has it all.

Basic Hosting starts at $5.75 a month, but that prices drops if you choose a longer contract (up to 30% off with a 5 year contract). With the Basic plan, you receive 10GB of space, 300GB of bandwidth, and only one domain. With the Deluxe ($8.75/month), those increase to 100GB of space, unlimited bandwidth, and 50 domains, and then Ultra plan ($15.99/month) offers unlimited in all those features.

All plans include some great tools to use for your website, including one-click installation for WordPress, Joomla, ZenCart, TikiWiki, Nucleus, and more. You also receive 100 email accounts with the Basic account (500 with Deluxe, unlimited with Ultra), and remote access to your server.

You can also register your domain at the site (limited types of domains, however).They also offer various business solutions, including the website builder package that starts at $49.00/month and includes free domain, Basic Hosting, and a professional web design. There are also options for SEO Marketing, Local Site Promotion, Email Marketing, and Social Networking.

Hostorian’s Review of Dotster Web Hosting

Dotster’s Performance

Dotster offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, with 24/7 network monitoring, full network redundancy, data backups, and Tier-1 Gigabit Internet connections.

Dotster’s Features

There are plenty of features available to the hosting packages. The packages include web analytic tools, remote database access, lots of one click install software packages (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, ZenCart, TikiWiki, etc.), and email anti-virus, auto-responder and POP/SMTP support.

Support and Customer Care by Dotster

Support for Dotster is rather limited considering the amount of domains under their control. Support is given by 24/7 phone support, and email, no live chat support. Several customers have noted that the support they received was rather poor, which is not a good sign.

They do have a FAQ/Knowledge base system on their website, but there is no way to input your own questions and there is no community feedback for helpful tips. You rely solely on the knowledge of the technicians at Dotster. The questions they answer are fairly diverse, but the answers do not have any videos or screenshots to help guide you through the process.

Pros

Offers one-stop shopping for all your hosting needs
Discounted rates depending on length of contract
Nearly 10 years of hosting experience to help you succeed

Cons

Basic Hosting is rather limited compared to other sites
Additional services offered are expensive
Poor reviews of customer support

Actual Customer Reviews of Dotster Web Hosting

“Dotster is absolutely the worst registrar I have ever had to deal with. I have been trying for two weeks now to change the name servers for a client to point to GoDaddy where he has his hosting account. I have been on hold with their non-existant “customer service” (now there’s an oxymoron) for as long as 178 minutes. My client is getting mad at me because I can not get his web site to show, I have submitted numerous tickets to Dotser with only one canned reply telling me someone would get back to me with-in 24 hours and never did and I can not reach them by phone. I have even tried calling their sales line and have gotten a message that said to contact them during normal business hours. When exactly are their normal business hours since it isnot 9-5 M-F Use Godaddy or another hosting company that also acts as a registrar, avoid Dotster like the plague – the Worst they should be investigated! “ - John Martin

“I switched from Register because of endless problems every time they implemented “improvements” and “upgrades,” to Dotster. I am very disappointed in its webmail, which is hardly user friendly. Downloading is extremely slow and most functions are also very slow. Technical support is limited to 9-5 weekdays and nothing on weekends. Support is poor and there are never any call backs.” - Jean Kirshenbaum

“I have dealt with many hosting companies in the past and I would rate Dotster as the worst. Buyer beware. I have never been in a situation where if I canceled early, I would not get a refund. I do not need to be hateful or anything but their plans are high and the service is not something I would recommend. At first things seemed great but after a while, service went down as well as speed. We were running a site with videos and the HD videos were so slow to load where Go Daddy has faster service and lower priced plans.” - Roger Sandoval

Verdict of this Dotster Review

After looking over all the services that Dotster offer, they looked like a good company to work with. The one-stop shopping is most convenient for people who do not want to worry about redirecting their name-servers and want options for design services. The list of one-click install for software options is impressive, and I was happy to see that you don’t need to pay an outrageous amount to get a blog or CMS site operational.

When I started reviewing the customer reviews, however, a different story emerges. There are plenty of poor comments about the lack of support received, customer service skills were poor, or there was no response at all. Support and customer service are very important when dealing with a hosting company because so many problems can arise, and often do, when setting up a site.

I would suggest people proceed with caution, and maybe go with the Basic package at first until you find a comfort level with the hosting services available to you. Several people made longterm commitments only to later regret them. Because of the customer complaints that were quite numerous, I would only rate Dotster a 3.5/5.

Click here to go to the official Dotster website.

CoreCommerce Web Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 03:33:12 +0000

CoreCommerce E-Commerce & Shopping Cart Hosting

A great web host for ecommerce & shopping cart hosting — highly recommended!
Click here to visit CoreCommerce’s website

Summary

CoreCommerce is a specialty website geared towards helping you set-up and run a fully featured eStore. The software was previously only available as a licensed property, but now offers a monthly service to help small to medium sized businesses grow. They currently power over 13,000 stores online, including clients such as, GE, Michigan State University, and Clear Channel Radio.

Quick Facts About CoreCommerce

CoreCommerce has been hosting eCommerce sites since 2008
13,000 stores online in 60 countries.
Tech Support Staff have an average tenure of 3 years.
Based in Franklin, TN, USA
Services: Beginner ($19.99/month), Starter ($24.99), Basic ($39.99), Standard ($79.99), and Pro ($99.99)
Phone: 800.747.4270

Products and Services by CoreCommerce

As mentioned previously, coreCommerce is a site focused on setting your eShops up quickly and easily.

Their Beginner package ($19.99/month) is for a small store of 100 products, 1 GB of data transfer, and 100 MB of storage space. That package scales up to the high-end of the Pro package which includes 5,000 products, 20 GB of data transfer, and 1 GB of storage space.

All packages include mobile commerce, Facebook Integration, free support, and no setup fee. If that wasn’t enough, they offer an additional 36 services included in the packages, among them: pre-designed templates, Quickbooks integration, Google Checkout, marketing tools, one page checkout, and much more.

coreCommerce really wants to see your site succeed, so they offer additional services to make sure that happens. If you want to accept credit card payments in your store, they offer a service to do that for you that is priced reasonably at 2.29% for Visa/Mastercard, plus a $10 monthly service fee. You can also register your domain name through the site.

The real helpful, but expensive, service they offer is the custom design packages. These packages cover all areas of the website: logo, slideshow for your products, homepage design, etc. They offer these services individually, or as packages that cover multiple items (starting at $1,999). There are cheaper options out there to get the design work done, but on the other hand, their designers have been using their product for a long time and will be comfortable with all the in’s and outs. If you have the money, it would be a worthwhile investment.

Hostorian’s Review of CoreCommerce Web Hosting

CoreCommerce Performance

CoreCommerce offers a 99.9% guarantee for uptime, but their hosting is done through Rackspace which offers a 100% guarantee for server uptime. From reading countless customer reviews of the site, not one of them have mentioned any issues with their store being down or other performance issues.

CoreCommerce Features

The list of features that are included with any of the hosting packages seems endless.

Here are some of the features that stand out on their lists that offers something additional to help your business grow:

Automatic free upgrades and updates
Phone order system and built in Point of Sale (POS)
Receive text message alerts for when orders are placed
Search engine friendly (entire site is optimized)
Gift certificate and coupon system
Integration with major shipping providers (USPS, UPS, FedEX, DHL, Canada Post, etc)
Customers can setup accounts for each store
Vendor and multiple warehouse control
And so much more!

Support and Customer Care by CoreCommerce

Support for coreCommerce comes from their live phone support (with a call centre based in the US, but not available 24/7), a 24/7 ticket system (supported after office hours by on-call engineers), and by live chat (regular office hours).

They also have training videos (including a YouTube channel) that cover topics as diverse as the Support Ticketing System to Configuring Pre-Designed Templates to setting up the Point of Sale system. The videos walk you through step-by-step and are quite detailed. With some of the videos have over 3,000 views on YouTube, the tutorial videos are getting well used.

CoreCommerce also has an extensive knowledge database available for customers to use through their forum.

Pros

Easy, free setup using pre-designed templates
Offers more services included in the package than one needs
Web design and marketing services available
Facebook, eBay, and mobile integration

Cons

No option to self-host on your own server (but can use custom domain names)
Not able to include a personal/company blog on the website.
No 24/7 hour support option by phone (only through emergency tickets to on-call engineers)

Actual Customer Reviews of CoreCommerce Hosting

“One of the biggest strengths is they don’t sit still. We had been with a web company that told us that their cart was basically ‘cooked’ or done as they called it. (Never tell me there will be no more features, especially in the online market.) CoreCommerce always seems to be coming out with new features, tweaks and upgrades. I love that. They also have free customer support with real people who want to help. That is huge. I have never had a bad experience with any of its customer service people.” – Tim Burns

“I’ve been in e-commerce for 5 years. During that time, I’ve built stores with Yahoo, Network Solutions (Monster Commerce), Volusion, and Core Commerce. We’ve had problems with the other providers, but CoreCommerce has been great.” - Ross Cohen

“I have used Miva, Yahoo Store, and Volusion in the past (having set-up multiple websites). I just decided to try the CoreCommerce software yesterday, and was able to put up a full-featured site in 48 hours. I am really impressed with the ease of use offered by CoreCommerce, love the pricing, and am hoping it will do well in terms of SEO too. Also, they have a lot of great features that you have to pay extra for when you use other software or buy modules (as in Miva).” - Cari Haus

Verdict of this CoreCommerce Review

CoreCommerce is a hosting site that offers more than one could ever imagine using, and the majority of it is rolled into their packages. With tight integration with important tools such as Facebook, mobile, shipping companies, and Quickbooks, you will be able to focus your attention to the products and customers, not the operation of the administrative tasks.

While the live support is lacking if you need assistance after 6pm EST, this may not be a major concern for people considering the uptimes are guaranteed at 100% through the Rackspace service. Having the training videos and forums may also solve your issues without having to make that phone call to the support centre.

I browsed several of the websites that use the CoreCommerce shopping cart software, and I came away quite impressed with the quality and layout of the designs. I went through the purchasing of a few items to get a feel for the checkout procedure, and it is very straight forward to use. There are going to be few to no phone calls to you asking for help when checking out with an order online.

Overall, this company is top notch from the top to the bottom with what they offer. Their monthly prices are higher than those of a regular hosting company, but the inclusion of so many services make it hard to beat. They are the best shopping cart option on the Internet today, and they rank highly with all of their customers.

I would have to rate CoreCommerce 4.5 stars out of 5.

Click here to visit CoreCommerce’s official website.

Cool Handle Web Hosting

Hostorian — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:08:16 +0000

Cool Handle Web Hosting

A good web host — recommended!
Click here to visit Cool Handle’s website

Summary

Cool Handle Hosting is a fully featured hosting company looking to help anyone get started, from beginners to professionals. With Cool Handle Hosting, you can register your domain name, choose a hosting package, and get your site operational right away. They offer round the clock support, plus additional services to help design your website to get you published and earning more revenue.

Quick facts about Cool Handle Web Hosting

Cool Handle Hosting was started in 2001.
Ranked highly on several web hosting sites.
Based in Florida.
Services: Starter package ($7.95/month), Business ($10.95), Professional ($12.95), plus 30 day money back guarantee.
Phone: 866.200.2828

Products and Services by Cool Handle Web Hosting

Cool Handle primarily focuses on managed servers, which allows you to focus on your content rather than be bothered with maintaining the server.

They do offer a dedicated package, but the server is not customizable if you want to upgrade the memory or hard drive space. The managed packages come in three tiers: Starter ($7.95/month), Business ($10.95) and Pro ($12.95). The only differences between the tiers are the amount of IP addresses and domains you can have. All three offer unlimited bandwidth and hard drive space, which will make the choice of package easier on the consumer.

Hostorian’s Review of Cool Handle Web Hosting

Cool Handle’s Performance

The website guarantees a 99.9% uptime for all servers, apart from the usual maintenance and upkeep. Out of all the customer reviews of the service online, only one mentioned problems of a server going down. That being said, an official from Cool Handle responded to the complaint and said it was the first time the server had failed since being installed, and was fixed right away.

Cool Handle’s Features

The features available for Cool Handle Hosting are endless. The highlights include instant backups and restore, web-based file manager, support for all major code and database types, a website builder, and support of Fantastico which allows you to install software easily (such as WordPress, Drupal, e-cart software, online support systems, and much more). Cool Handle also includes a webmail application, a full suite of tracking programs to get your website statistics, and usage of CPanel (for Linux) or Plex (for Windows) – the best control panels for servers available.

Support and Customer Care by Cool Handle

There are several options to receive support with Cool Hosting, just like other major hosting companies, whether you are a customer with them or not.

There are agents available for a phone call 24/7, as well as, live chat (which doesn’t ask you to install any software, but does ask for an email address). The agent I decided to chat with was very polite and prompt with their responses.

Cool Handle also offers a knowledge base archive to browse through, and flash tutorials. The tutorials that I watched were very well put together, and some of the best I’ve seen on the Internet. They cover all the major software Cool Handle supports, and go into detail about certain tasks. One could easily design a good website through watching these tutorials alone.

One more thing I mentioned earlier is that Cool Handle has agents browsing the review sites and responding to the users. That is a sign that they understand consumer needs and care enough to make people happy.

Pros

Loads of software options available to load onto your site
24/7 Live Support by phone, email, or live chat
Video tutorials for all software options, including email, ftp, WordPress

Cons

Only one option available for dedicated servers
Not many upgrades with more expensive packages
Slightly more expensive than other options

Actual Customer Reviews of Cool Handle Web Hosting

“I used Cool Handle hosting services for more than 4 years now, the service, price and features are the best, with lowest prices, unlimited space and bandwidth and some special packages, this is one of the best services I had ever found and I’m glad to say I proudly recommend this company. 100% uptime, great customer service and attention.” - Alejandro Vallejo

“I’m happy to report that my experience with their hosting service has been outstanding. I’ve been with other hosts, and no one has ever been as forthcoming with explanations as they have been. For example, I am new to cpanel, and their cpanel Wizard walked me through right away. I had no questions left to ask when I finished with my setups.” - Ed Peters

“CoolHandle provides awesome service with great customer service and the best of all, great prices! There’s no need to look anywhere. They are all about customer service…” - David Chau

Verdict of this Cool Handle Review

There is so much being offered by Cool Handle that it is really difficult to list absolutely everything without just copying and pasting from their website. The amount of software options that can be loaded on with a few clicks of the button is a bit overwhelming. They have the ability to provide software for every kind of website out there – blogs, eCommerce, customer care portals, and so on. Their Flash tutorials and website design services make Cool Handle really stand out from the competitors.

After reading through thirty comments left by users, I only discovered the one negative review. That bodes well for the site, because one would expect to find primarily negative reviews on the Internet. The negative issues were very minor in comparison to some other sites I have read over, too.

If you are looking for a place to register your domain name, and start up a blog today, Cool Handle Hosting would be the ideal spot for you. The options are endless with this company, and are there to help you create the best website imaginable.

I would rate Cool Handles highly, giving them at least a 4/5 from what I’ve read on their website, the tutorials, and customer reviews. The only thing stopping me from making them a 5 is they are a little more expensive than other hosting sites (only by a few dollars a month). If you know what you’re doing, you may want to look at a cheaper alternative, but if you’re a beginner, Cool Handles is perfect for you.

Click here to visit Cool Handle web hosting’s official website.

Codero Web Hosting

Hostorian — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:37:51 +0000

Codero Web Hosting Ratings

A good web host overall, with some caveats
Click here to visit Codero’s official website

Summary

Codero is a relatively new hosting option, having started up only in summer of 2009. That being said, they do have an extensive background in hosting from working with other companies. After 15 years working with Aplus.net’s hosting solution, they have a wealth of experience to draw from, offering hosting solutions for small to mid-size companies.

Quick Facts About Codero Web Hosting

Codero was started in July 2009
Ranked in the Top 10 for hosting on several hosting review sites.
Servers in Phoenix,AZ and San Diego,CA
Services: Dedicated or Managed Server (starting at $60/month), Backup services ($10/month and up), network uptime guarantee of 99.9% (hardware 100%)
Phone: 877-999-2750

Products and Services by Codero Web Hosting

Codero offers a wide range of services, and all of them are customizable.

Starting with a dedicated or managed servers from $60 a month, you can upgrade every aspect of the service. The most basic, dedicated server offers a 1.8GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 250 GB hard drive. That server can be upgraded all the way to include a Intel Core Duo 3.0 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM, four 1.5TB hard drives, plus upgrades to bandwidth and IP addresses.

A Linux-based operating system is included, with the option to upgrade to a Windows-based system.

Hostorian’s Review of Codero Web Hosting

Codero’s Performance

There aren’t many independent customer reviews available on the Internet, but the ones I have come across have been one way or the other. Two common themes: up-time is not very reliable, and the price is very competitive. Several people have commented that their dedicated servers remained down for up to a week at a time, with no refunds available. The problems started in 2009 and have persisted until the latest incident in July 2010.

Features of Codero Web Hosting

The features available for Codero are very limited in comparison to other hosting companies. There is an e-commerce add-on, email hosting, and remote access control panels, but when compared to other companies that offer various blogging platforms, Drupal, Joomla, or even a basic site builder, Codero is definitely geared to a larger, established company than a newcomer wanting to start up an online business.

Codero’s Support and Customer Care

There are several options to receive support with Codero, whether you are a customer or not.

There are agents available for a phone call 24/7, as well as, live chat (which does NOT ask you to install any software). The agent I decided to chat with was very polite and prompt with their responses. They actually spent the time to read what I was asking about (best package to choose for a website), asked some follow-up questions, and provided a reasonable answer.

Another great option is the Knowledge Base. At that site, you can search through the articles, or post your own, to discover the answers to a wide-range of problems. Because Codero uses common operating systems, the information found on other websites would be more in depth and helpful, but having a local option is nice for people not wanting to do an extensive search for information.

Pros

Servers are completely customizable from RAM, Hard drive, Operation System
24/7 Live Support
Reasonably priced

Cons

Automated backups of servers is an extra cost
Not for beginners
Long down times noted by some users

Actual Customer Reviews of Codero Web Hosting

“2 hours now my server’s been down.. They rebooted it an hour ago..worked for 10 minutes..and then down again. This is how its been the last 2 days since relocating to Phoenix.” - Mike2010

“Codero has been amazing. Super faster server, only matched by their network and support staff. One of the best thing’s I’ve ever done with my business.” - Landmine

“The dedicated server went down and stayed down for almost a week. When the service was restored they couldn’t recover any data, citing corrupted hard disk. We had to use our own out-of-date backup and live with the missing data. Customer service response time was acceptable but the attitude and ability to solve the problem weren’t. They had the balls to suggest paying for the backup service!! Moved to a different shared host and couldn’t believe the difference in price and cp features. We canceled the service but didn’t do it in time before the automatic renewal date as Codero requires 7 days notice. I contacted the customer representative stating the case and asked him to hold the charges. When he responded a week later the card was already charged and they refused to give any refund, steadfastly referring to the term of service. So we paid $660 for 3 days of unused service. Horrible customer service, unreliable hosting, and no automatic backup for the premium dedicated server service.” - Codero Customer

Verdict of this Codero Web Hosting Review

After analyzing the comments left on the various review sites, choosing Codero appears to be a crap-shoot.

The comments about the servers being down for any length of time over an hour concerns me. Unless those sites were operating a service as large as Twitter, there should be no reason for those servers to be down for so long.

The only thing stopping me from giving Codero a zero rating is the number of reviews out there is a very low number. A small sample size of only six reviews does not mean much. That being said, Codero’s website only has five positive reviews themselves, which does not bode well for their product.

If you’re comfortable working with a Linux server, and need a place to test and design your site, Codero seems to be an attractive option for you. The options to customize are very broad, and the prices cheap. With that cheap price comes the chance of a server failure, so I do suggest an off-site backup option.

Until I see more positive reviews, I can only rate Codero a 2/5 for people looking for 100%, guaranteed up-time.

Click here to visit Codero’s official website

Aplus.Net Web Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:06:22 +0000

Aplus.Net Web Hosting Ratings

Somewhat good, somewhat bad
Click here to visit Aplus.Net’s official website

Summary

Aplus.net is a fully featured hosting company that offers a range of services. You can register a domain name, host a website (shared or dedicated services), have them handle your web design, or have them assist you in marketing your website. Aplus.net is also the company working with Codero Hosting.

Quick Facts About Aplus.Net Web Hosting

Aplus.net has been hosting websites since 1998
Ranked poorly on several web hosting sites.
Voted CNet’s Most Popular Web Hosting company.
Based in Kansas
Services: Personal Plan ($5.95/month), Business ($7.46), Professional ($14.96), plus many more hosting options. Includes a 30 day money back guarantee.
Phone: 913.563.6462

Products and Services by Aplus.Net Web Hosting

It will be impossible to list every single service you can find at Aplus.net. The service with the most demand will be their hosting solutions, which offers a shared server solution, but has the option for a dedicated server through their sister company, Codero.

With reasonable rates, Aplus.net’s Personal Plan starts at $5.95/month for a Linux server with 15GB of space, 250GB bandwidth, one domain, and a limited selection of software options to quick install. The service is ready to support some of the main software options out there (WordPress CMS, Joomla, and Drupal), but does not come ready to support WordPress blogging software. As the plans become more expensive, the software options grow significantly, as does the space available and bandwidth.

Hostorian’s Review of Aplus.Net Web Hosting

Aplus.Net’s Performance

Aplus.net offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for users, and also includes a 30 day money back guarantee if you do have issues with the service. After browsing through some of the customer review sites, the uptime scores were real low. A lot of people made comments about their websites being down frequently.

Features of Aplus.Net Web Hosting

The features available for Aplus.net are limited for the lower grade plans. The most valued features available will be the firewall, virus protection, redundant power supply, and support for all major scripting languages. With the Business plan and up, your options open up wider, with some of the standouts being a website builder, WordPress blog support, and search engine optimization.

Aplus.Net’s Support and Customer Care

There are several options to receive support with Aplus.net, just like other major hosting companies, whether you are a customer with them or not. There are agents available for a phone call 24/7, as well as, live chat (which doesn’t ask you to install any software.)

Aplus.net also offers an extensive knowledge base archive to browse through. The questions I looked at were quite detailed with their responses, and included links to the software vendor’s website for more information. Step by step explanations were a welcome sight to see, and the steps were very specific.

Pros

Inexpensive option for hosting a website
24/7 Live Support by phone, email, or live chat, plus knowledge base
Web design and marketing services available

Cons

Personal Plan (the basic plan) does not support WordPress and is very limited.
Customers rank the services very poorly, with frequent downtime for sites

Actual Customer Reviews for Aplus.Net Web Hosting

“I have been a customer of Aplus since 2005. The other day I had them upgrade my website from “parking status” to active status. They inadvertently eliminated my entire website. Wiped it out completely.” - Nancy Passot

“I’m a web designer and use / have used many different hosting companies over the years. Aplus.net was the absolute worst out of all of them. Frequent down time, terrible customer services, and questionable billing practices.” – Chris

“I signed up with aplus in March 09 and was satisfied for the first 6 months. When they “upgraded” in Dec. 09, everything blew up. Communication and support were awful during the transition. They took away options and downtime was rampant. Run away.” – Gary Wilson

Verdict of this Aplus.Net Review

It is difficult to come to a fair conclusion about Aplus.net’s services. On the one hand, they claim to have over 110,000 websites, and 400,000 domains registered. On the other, there is a legion of users out there calling for the end of this company, filing for lawsuits, and complain to the Better Business Bureaus across the United States.

Looking at the services they offer, Aplus.net offers lower priced services, but their beginner packages are very limited in comparison to some of the other major hosting sites out there. Their knowledge base for support is quite good, but I can’t comment on their other support systems. They do have other services available mentioned previously, like website design, but they fail to include samples of their work for the sites. A small picture showing “Air Conditioning Solutions,” does not tell me a whole lot about the quality of the work.

The number of negative reviews about this company are staggering, going back as far as five years ago to the present. Compared to some of the other sites, they receive a far larger share of the negative reviews, it seems. With 150+ people in agreement, I would say to be cautious when signing up for Aplus.net.

Click here to visit Aplus.Net Web Hosting’s Official Website.

Top Rated Web Hosts For Shared Web Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 16 May 2010 07:42:45 +0000

Here are the top rated web hosts for shared web hosting, ranked in no particular order.

Bluehost

Bluehost is one of my top recommended web hosts for shared hosting. Not just because I have a personal experience with them, or because their CEO personally replied back to my email.

I love Bluehost because of their superior performance and uptime, their commitment to customer support (I usually get replies to my emails withing minutes!), their rich feature set, and competitive pricing.

IX Web Hosting

IX Web Hosting offers a lot of features in their hosting plans, and their prices are extremely low in comparison to some other companies out there. They have the great option to try out their services risk-free for seven days. That gives you plenty of time to get familiar with the administrative tools and the tutorial videos.

Because of all the positive reviews that I came across on the web, I will have to say ix Web Hosting is one of the best companies available on the web to host your site on. It is rare to come across a company that receives positive comments, is customer service oriented, and has some great web tutorials.

Inmotion Hosting

Inmotion Hosting looks like one of the best kept secrets for hosting companies. Because of all the positive reviews that I came across on the web, I will have to say inmotion Hosting is one of the best companies available on the web to host your site on.

It is rare to come across a company that receives positive comments about the server uptime to support to the features available. inmotion Hosting is highly recommended and gets the top rating at the Hostorian.

HostGator

HostGator is one of the most referred hosting sites on the Internet today. You will hear good things about HostGator everywhere. They have excellent customer service, and their customers rate them 5/5.

With great choices for software to get your website operational right away, they offer more bang for your buck than most competition out there.

Jumpline Web Hosting

I like Jumpline because of their superb infrastructure that enables them to have a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) and reliable connectivity. They have a great offer going at the time of this writing, letting you get two years of free shared hosting with them.

Jumpline Web Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:57:20 +0000

Summary:

Jumpline web hosting has two great offers apart from their regular offers – a two year FREE shared web hosting account (click here) and a six months FREE VPS hosting account (click here). (These offers are not available on their regular pages.)

The company was founded in 1997 and has been providing reliable web hosting services to several thousands of customers since then.

Quick Facts About Jumpline:

Number of domains hosted: Over 100,000
Services: Domain name registration, shared hosting, VPS hosting, bare metal hosting, dedicated server hosting, managed server hosting, and even custom hosting solutions for you
Location: Columbus, Ohio (USA)
Guarantees: 30-day money back guarantee, 100% uptime, under 4-hour support ticket resolution, daily backups
Contact information: Call 1-800-651-2028 (toll free), or 00+1+614-859-1170 (international), or visit their contact page

Products and Services By Jumpline Web Hosting:

Domain registration (at $9.95), Shared hosting (starting at $7.95/month), Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting (starting at $27.95/month), Bare Metal Hosting (starting at $59.95/month), Dedicated Server hosting (starting at $99.95/month), and even custom hosting solutions.

They also have a two year FREE shared web hosting account (click here) and a six months FREE VPS hosting account available (click here). These offers are not available through their regular website and you need to click the above links to see them.

Hostorian’s Jumpline Review:

Jumpline’s Performance

Jumpline has a really impressive infrastructure to boast of. They have multiple Tier 1 providers for bandwidth and IP services, providing reliable connectivity and round the clock monitoring. They take all these providers and blend them into a single handoff thereby providing a superior performance.

They have a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA), which is possible due to their advanced physical and logical network architecture, six-carrier blend and fault tolerant cores. Factor in redundant cores, redundant power, and daily backups, and what you get is a state of the art high performance data center, virtually guaranteeing that your site is never down.

They get an excellent rating for performance and uptime.

Features of Jumpline web hosting

Jumpline web hosting doesn’t really offer a rich feature set. Most of their products and services are a bit expensive compared to other web hosts, and the feature set they offer is really lackluster in comparison. They don’t even offer a free domain with their shared hosting account, which most hosting providers do these days.

They do let you choose your control panel though (cPanel or Parallels Plesk Panel), and you can switch from one control panel to another and vice versa as you wish.

Jumpline’s Support and Customer Care

Their customer support is simply fantastic, according to most people who have reported about it on the Internet. They have a US based call center, which means no more struggling with foreign accents and timely resolution of issues. An in-house customer support facility also means problems can get sorted out quicker than if it was outsourced to a third world country in a different time zone than the rest of their staff. They claim a 1-hour average time for support ticket resolutions and 24/7/365 customer support.

All in all, great customer support! They do lack online chat support though, which is a must if you want to ask quick questions before you decide upon a particular web host.

Pros

In-house customer support staff (US based), so you don’t have to deal with call centers in third world countries with accents you don’t understand.
Great customer support with awesome resolution times. They respond to your emails within a couple hours at the most.
Extremely good performance and reliable hosting
Great prices for dedicated and VPS hosting.
If you want to experience their level and quality of service, you can give them a try before committing. Click here to get a shared hosting account for free (two years!), and click here to get a VPS account for free (six months).

Cons

Their shared hosting plans are a little expensive compared to other shared web hosting providers, but when you consider the high speed connectivity and almost 100% uptime, it may be worth it for your business. Besides, they do offer a free two year shared hosting plan for you to check them out.
You need to install the applications yourself. But this is easily taken care of by their robust and extensive documentation for everything. And if you need more help, you can always reach their customer support staff 24×7.
They don’t offer a lot of features and limited amount of bandwidth and disk space compared to other web hosts.

Actual Customer Feedback About Jumpline Web Hosting:

Terrible customer service. Always playing the blame game and never taking responsibility for their service issues. I’d recommend staying far, far away from this company. – sp ( sibyl2(at)yahoo(dot)com )

I have been a customer of Jumpline.com for about 9 years. I have seen other companies come and offer better deals but one thing has kept me a loyal customer to them, a 800 number that I can call and get someone. I am a reseller through them and have over 30 websites. I am extremely satisfied with Jumpline.com service, support and applications. The only thing that i wish they offered is the ability to host my own server. I HIGHLY recommend them. – Alexander ( ah5890 at aol dot com )

They are the best free hosting server you can get (like a dedicated server at no cost). They do not charge you, but you need to add the credit card number. – Anonymous

These guys have incredible up time and great customer support – Chad Brosious

Verdict Of This Jumpline Web Hosting Review:

Although Jumpline web hosting does seem a little expensive and lacking in features, they more than make up for it by offering two free years of shared web hosting and six free months of VPS hosting. A great customer service, 100% uptime SLA, and redundant power supply, redundant cores, high speed connectivity and their attention to a lot of small details make this a web host that can be trusted to host your website.

Verdict: It’s OK to host your website with Jumpline web hosting.

Click here to get a shared hosting account for free with Jumpline (two years!)
Click here to get a VPS account for free with Jumpline (six months).

Web hosting shopping cart

Hostorian — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:36:32 +0000

coreCommerce is highly recommended by the Hostorian for their excellent software for shopping cart and ecommerce. Check them out!

Many people jump the gun when choosing which shopping cart will fit their needs.

Don’t start with a comparison of features of the shopping carts

The first thing that most people look for are the features that they want. However, if you take the time and do a thorough search, you will always be able to find the features that you want.

Since features are easy to find, or integrate, they should also be the last factor when determining which shopping cart fits your needs. This is not to say that features aren’t critical, but rather that they should be the last criteria used to narrow down your list.

There is nothing worse than finding the perfectly-featured shopping cart, only to find out that it isn’t compatible with your servers operating system. It is even worse to find out that it is self-hosted, and you want a 3rd party web hosting shopping cart.

The first thing that you must decide is whether or not you want a self hosted option or 3rd party web hosting shopping cart. Here are some important facts to consider when deciding where you want to host your shopping cart.

Security issues of a shopping cart

When you choose a 3rd party web hosting shopping cart, they will handle all of the security issues. This is because your customers will actually be checking out through their website.

With a self hosted shopping cart, you will need to ensure your customers security yourself. While this isn’t inherently difficult, it is an additional factor that needs to be taken into consideration because it will cost time, money, and ongoing maintenance.

Shopping Cart Maintenance Level

With 3rd party web hosting shopping carts, there is very little maintenance on your end. Once your products are set up, your website is good to go.

With a self-hosted shopping cart, you will continually be working to maintain it. Your maintenance could be security one day and software upgrades the next.

Shopping Cart Control

3rd party web hosting shopping carts only allow for a comparatively small amount of personalization and control, whereas self hosted carts give you infinite control. You have the ability to modify and control the entire check out process as well as what everything looks like.

There are a number of factors that must be weighed in order to choose the perfect shopping cart to fit your needs.

However, the most important decision that you need to make is whether or not you want to host it yourself, or use a 3rd party web hosting shopping cart. This decision will have a huge impact on what is available to you and what you will be able to modify to fit your needs.

Web Hosting FTP

Hostorian — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:47:03 +0000

FTP web hosting can seem a bit overwhelming if you do not understand what FTP is or how it works. Once you understand it; however, it can quickly become your best friend.

Here is a quick overview of FTP web hosting so that you have a solid foundation to build upon as you learn.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and allows files to be transferred to and from one computer system to another.

It was originally designed to compliment HTTP, which can format and deliver web pages but cannot transfer files. This symbiotic connection makes web hosting FTP invaluable.

FTP also makes it easy for multiple people to work together and share projects easier.

The Fundamentals of Web Hosting FTP

The server of a web hosting service stores all of the files and information in a centralized location. Anyone who knows how to access the server can upload and download the files using FTP.

FTP web hosting also makes it easy to arrange and manage the files into directories and sub-directories, as well as change their accessibility. Unique usernames and passwords are almost always required to ensure the security of the server.

Web hosting FTP can be easily broken down into two basic components: The Server and The Client

The server is where all of the files are actively stored. How much data the server can hold is based upon the web hosting package that is chosen by the client. It could be shared with hundreds of other people, or dedicated to only one person.

The FTP client is the interface that is used to upload and download in a fashion that is considered to be user-friendly. The FTP client also creates an extra layer of security through usernames and passwords, as well as simplifies the whole process.

Because using FTP is critical as well as a way to simplify file transfers, it is important to find a web hosting service that offer web hosting FTP.

It is also important to make sure that the FTP client is easy to use. Using a web hosting service without FTP will quickly become frustrating, and will likely send you scrambling to a different web hosting service that offers FTP.

Web hosting FTP can be easily broken down into two basic components: The Server and The Client

File Hosting Service

Web hosting affiliate

Hostorian — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:50:54 +0000

Web hosting affiliate programs are some of the most popular online affiliate programs. It shouldn’t come as a surprise because it seems like everyone who works or plays online has a website.

At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that these arena of affiliate programs is considered to be one of the most competitive, especially if you want web hosting affiliate programs to be the backbone of your affiliate empire.

Some people use web hosting affiliate programs as a form of residual passive income. They will have web hosting banners on their website and may passively promote them, but they are more of a bonus conversion rather than the focal point.

Regardless of what you want to use your web hosting affiliate program for, it is important to choose which programs that you want to promote wisely. Here are some quick tips to help you decide which web hosting affiliate program is right for you.

What Will You Get Paid For?

The terms of every web hosting affiliate program is a little different, and it is important for you to understand what you will get paid for.

Some will only pay you if your referral signs up for website hosting, while others will also pay out affiliate commissions if the customer orders other products such as SSL certificates or buys a domain name.

Referral length is another factor that will directly relate to how much money you can make with the affiliate program. The referral length is the amount of time that your customer remains your customer.

The first is how long your referral ID will be attached to their account. Some last 30 or 60 days, while others last forever.

This is important because if your program has a 30 day referral length, then you will not get paid if the customer signs up 31 days after visiting your website. The longer the referral length, the better.

Do They Work With an Affiliate Network?

It is important to leverage the power of an affiliate network whenever possible. Affiliate networks not only ensure that you get paid what you have earned, but also offer valuable tools and information that you may not be able to get elsewhere.

Affiliate networks often have additional or unique banners, prewritten scripts for blogs, articles, etc They also give you more accurate statistics regarding conversion rates as well as a better idea of how well the program is working out for others.

There are a lot variables that can go into choosing the best web hosting affiliate program for you, but these two simple tips can help you refine your search and get the information that you need to make the best decision.

Server Hosting

Unlimited Domain Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:03:33 +0000

Unlimited Domain Hosting has become a priority feature and web hosting providers have responded in an overwhelming fashion. Almost every hosting service offers unlimited domain hosting.

While being able to host unlimited domains is critical, there are other features that must not be overlooked based upon what you are doing.

Two main reasons that unlimited domain hosting is sought after

The first is because domain/website sellers/resellers need to be able to display their domains and websites in order to make sales.

The other reason why many people need unlimited domain hosting is because they will be working on building multiple websites at once. They are improving promising websites, and selling the others.

Regardless of why you need to host a large number of domains, let’s take a look at some other important features that are critical to keep in mind.

Disk Space

It won’t matter that you can host 100 domains if there is not enough disk space to support your websites. If you lack disk space, you can upgrade your package to get more space, but it is even more ideal to have enough disk space regardless of how many domains you are hosting.

Many unlimited domain hosting services also offer unlimited space, but be sure to read the fine print.

While you may have “unlimited space” in the perfect world, there is often a limit on how quickly you can use up your disk space.

In actuality, it is up to the hosting company to give you the additional space as it is needed. This will rarely be a problem if you grow your portfolio slowly. It can be an issue if you plan on transferring 100 full-fledged websites at once.

Bandwidth

Just because your unlimited domain hosting company will let you host as many domains as you want, that doesn’t mean that you will be given the bandwidth all of your websites need.

Additionally, many hosting companies will charge you extra if you use up more than your allotted bandwidth on a monthly basis. Even worse, if you do not have enough bandwidth, your websites will load extremely slowly and even dedicated users may start to fall off the bandwagon.

Unlimited domain hosting has become a critical feature, but it is important to keep the disk space that you are allotted, and the bandwidth that you can use. If either of these two features fall short, not just one of your domains will be affected, but potentially all of them.

Domain Registration Hosting

Streaming Video Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:39:35 +0000

Streaming video has taken over the internet with the emergence of both free and paid streaming video hosting services.

However, as this phenomenon continues to grow, many webmasters are left wondering about where they should host their videos. Some people prefer to host the videos on their own server, while others prefer using a streaming video hosting service.

Regardless of which option you choose, there are some important facets that need to be kept in mind.

There are potential drawbacks wherever your decide to host your videos. The key is choosing which drawbacks may apply to your situation and avoid them.

Free Streaming Video Hosting

Free streaming video hosting through websites like YouTube have grown extremely popular; however, there are some potential drawbacks that may affect your website.

The first is that YouTube will provide links to related videos near your video. If your competition has a related video, then it is possible to lose your customer to them.

However, if you are adding the video to your website as well, this could be minimized, especially if the video is product-specific.

YouTube also has a tendency to make videos look a little grainy. This is because they reformat your video so that it takes up less space. If it is reformatted poorly, there is very little that you will be able to do.

Commercial Streaming Video Hosting

The primary drawback to commercial hosting is that it can be outside the range of many new businesses budgets, and even beyond their needs.

It is important to decide if paying a commercial streaming video hosting provider is actually worth the cost.

Additionally, if you choose an unreliable commercial provider, there is a chance that your videos will not be available when someone visits your website.

Hosting Streaming Videos Yourself

It can be argued that hosting streaming videos on your own server will eat up your bandwidth as well as your disk space.

However, if you need less than 1000 total minutes of play-time a day, then hosting it yourself may not be a bad option. Unfortunately, once your website grows, you may need to get more server space as well as more bandwidth.

Streaming video hosting has become essential to many websites. While the importance of video isn’t doubted, the problem lies in where to host the videos. All three options have their potential drawbacks, but at least one option will fit your needs.

Streaming Audio Hosting

Hostorian — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:04:33 +0000

Streaming audio hosting has surged in popularity over the last half decade, and it will continue to get more popular. This increase in use has cause a number of new technologies to be designed and recording and sharing audio online is easier than ever before.

Steaming audio hosting has become utilized by everyone from unknown garage bands to big businesses.

Streaming audio hosting is now a common business tool that is used by individuals, businesses, and organizations for a variety of purposes.

This hosting is a great tool that is used for sharing recording of almost everything from a Sunday sermon to political speeches. It is utilized to hold more than just big audio files. It is also used to hold small recordings like the background music that you find on many sites.

When you choose your next streaming audio hosting service, it is important to keep a couple things in mind.

Since your streaming audio needs to be played as soon as it is called upon, you need to make sure that your host is reliable. If your streaming audio host is unreliable, then you will never know if your audio is going to be accessible or not.

This is especially true when choosing a free streaming audio host. If your free host flops, then you will lose your audio files.

If you have a lot incoming audio files and lose them because your host stops providing their service, it could take days or even weeks to get all of your links changed and audio files reloaded onto a new server.

You also need to consider how much space and bandwidth you have.

If your audios are accessed extremely often, then there is a chance that you could max out the bandwidth or storage space that your streaming audio host provided for you. When this happens, you will either be charged additional overage fees or if you are using a free service, they may just cancel your account.

Streaming audio hosting will be around for as long as audio files need to be stored. Some people choose to use their own website, free hosting service, or commercial streaming audio hosting.

Regardless of which method you choose, it is important to make sure that it is reliable and has enough storage and bandwidth to fit your needs.

SQL hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 08:48:51 +0000

It can be a tough choice for first-time web developers when they are trying to decide between SQL hosting and MySQL hosting. There are a number of questions surrounding issues like reliability, features, and simply which one is better.

Many people feel that SQL is the better choice, although there is a large amount of debate. While they both are utilized to manage and store data through a user interface, they have some stark differences that has made SQL the preferred option.

Both SQL and MySQL hosting gives you access to data through standard based protocols and they both support all of the major protocols.

The programming language that is used to communicate with the database is known as tSQL or Transact SQL. This allows users to modify data by deleting, inserting, and updating.

tSQL follows ANSI (American National Standards Institute) guidelines, which is where some concerns about MySQL are raised. MySQL does not completely follow the ANSI guidelines and standards.

The tools that accompany both SQL and MySQL are different as well. MySQL focuses more on selecting, displaying, updating, and saving data; however, falls short when it comes to deleting and inserting data.

If you are designing a medium to large database or are involved in commerce than SQL hosting stands far above MySQL.

A SQL server also has a number of additional standard features as well. It supports User Defined Functions, Triggers, full Import/Export, Cursor Support, Stored Procedures, Transaction Support, and Full Join capabilities.

SQL servers also give you full control over your database. Administrators can abstract database designs by utilizing SQL VIEWS.

Another great tool that puts you in control are UDF’s or User Defined Functions. User Defined Functions allow you to create complex code and store it into a simple interface.

All of these SQL tools are in addition to the features that are also on MySQL.

While there are good arguments on both sides of the table, SQL seems to have the edge. It has all of the features that MySQL as well as many others. It is also fully standardized based on the ANSI guidelines and offers a more simplified yet complete way to create and manage your databases.

If you are still trying to decide for yourself if SQL hosting is right for you, then there are a number of intense and informative forums discussions about this very issue.

Secure Web Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:24:00 +0000

Security should always be a primary concern when choosing your web hosting provider. A secure web hosting provider will give you the tools that you need to ensure that your website is always safe.

Many people shy away from shared hosting because it is unreliable, but in all reality, it is as safe as any other type of hosting. Remember, making sure that your information is secure will be just as much your responsibility as your hosts.

Let’s take a look at some of the tools that a secure web hosting company should provide for you.

SSL, SSH, Secure FTP, and POP3 – must have features for secure web hosting

These four features are critical to create a secure web hosting environment. They will allow you to manage your website without exposing your confidential data.

All of them help to encrypt data that is being sent between your computer and your website when doing thing like transferring files, entering usernames and passwords, and using your email.

Keep an eye out for SSL certificates. It is important to double check and make sure that you get an SSL certificate. Many hosts advertise that SSL is included, however, they really mean that they are SSL ready and you have to purchase it yourself.

Most hosts will not provide SSL to every client, but if they do, you will immediately know that they are a secure web hosting company.

Denial of Service

Denial of service is a tactic that hackers use to attack your website. It makes your website unavailable to your visitors. When this happens, you will not only lose business, but they will often redirect your traffic to something that they can profit from such as pornography or a website that will load them up with malware.

An Anti-Dos solution is important to have.

cPanel

cPanel is often considered to the most secure hosting control panel available. Not everyone uses cPanel, but it is definitely a great addition that any secure web hosting company will provide.

2X Anti (Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam)

2X Anti (Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam) solutions are absolutely critical for every webmaster. Spam is everywhere and can do more than just waste your time, it can be potentially very dangerous.

Viruses and other malware can find its way onto your webspace, so make sure that you have an anti-virus tool at your disposal.

Secure web hosting is a critical issue, but remember it is both your responsibility and the responsibility of your hosting provider to create a secure environment.

No related posts.

Message Board Hosting

Hostorian — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:59:52 +0000

When it comes to message board hosting, there are two fundamental options: self hosted or 3rd party hosting.

Message board, also known as forums, are becoming an increasingly popular method of expanding conversations that are started elsewhere or just a great place to get questions answered.

The first decision that has to be made once you have decided to start a forum is where to host it. There are benefits and drawbacks to both self hosting and 3rd party message board hosting.

Here is a quick comparison of common trade-offs that need to be considered.

Message Board Hosting – Flexibility vs. Effort

One of the primary reasons that people choose to self host their message board is that they have complete and total control over their forum. This allows for maximum flexibility to do anything that the owner wants.

While 3rd party message board hosting offers much less flexibility, it does allow someone to start a message board within minutes and the overall level of effort needed to maintain the message board is drastically less.

The fundamental question is, “Would you prefer complete flexibility and control over your website (which means more time and effort) or a standardized message board that can still be modified but has limitations on control and flexibility (but will be much easier to maintain)”.

Message Board Hosting – Cost vs Profit

The second trade-off is cost vs. profit.

Self hosted message boards will cost some money to maintain (hosting fees) and often necessitate initially purchasing your preferred message board software (but free message board software exists as well).

3rd party message board hosting companies are almost all free. This means that you will never pay a cent for your message board.

Self hosted message boards can be monetized however you want, which can lead to larger, long term profits.

3rd party message board hosting often means that whoever is hosting the message board will place their own ads on your message board (which is how they cover their own costs).

Fundamentally, this conflict boils down to: self hosting has more costs, but more potential profits vs. 3rd party hosting is free, but rarely profitable.

Both self hosted message boards and 3rd party message board hosting offer excellent solutions, however only one of them will be right for your needs.

If you are trying to start a profitable message board, then self hosting is probably right for you. However, if you are creating a message board solely for entertainment and enjoyment, then 3rd party message board hosting may be what you want.

Managed Dedicated Hosting

Hostorian — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 06:01:45 +0000

Cool Handle is highly recommended by the Hostorian for their managed and dedicated server hosting. Check them out!

Many people become hesitant when it is finally time to get a dedicated hosting plan. This is often because they do not have the technical knowledge that is necessary to update and maintain their own server.

Fortunately, there is an option that gives you all of the benefits of dedicated hosting without the burden of taking care of it yourself.

Managed dedicated hosting has proven to be the best solution for a growing number of webmasters that need the resources of an entire server, but little technical knowledge.

Benefits of Managed Dedicated Hosting

Here are a few reasons why you might consider getting managed dedicated hosting for your business.

Excellent Management

Managed dedicated hosting gives you the support that you need to ensure that your server is always ready to go.

Instead of having to take care of everything yourself, the hosting company will manage the upkeep and maintenance of your server for you. They will often take care of issues like security monitoring, server backups, server configuration, firewall configuration, as well as regular software updates.

Cost-Effective

Many people would argue that dedicated hosting is always the most expensive option. While dedicated hosting always will have the highest annual fees, utilizing managed dedicated hosting can save you money over the long term.

By having the service provide manage your server means that you will not have to hire someone to do it for you or spend countless days, weeks, or months trying to master the fine art of maintaining a server.

If you need the enough resources to warrant a dedicated server, then you might as well let professionals manage it for you.

Full Time Monitoring

Since your server will be under the watchful eye of your hosting provider, you can rest assured that your website is always online and your server is always running smoothly. It is all of the benefits of shared hosting only with a lot more resources and flexibility.

Reliable

Most people that are not technically savvy will still try their hand at managing their own server. This will almost always lead to a large amount of down-time due to technical issues.

With managed hosting, you get full support from your hosting providers support staff whenever you need it.

If dedicated hosting is a must, then managed dedicated hosting solutions will prove to be the best option for a majority of webmasters. It is a more efficient choice because it is cost-effective, monitored around the clock, and extremely reliable.

Linux reseller hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:29:56 +0000

Running your own Linux reseller hosting business can seem like an intimidating proposition.

In order to help get you started, let’s quickly talk about what Linux reseller hosting is, and a few tips to get you headed in the right direction.

What is Linux Reseller Hosting

Reseller hosting is similar to renting out a room in your house or apartment. You get a your own Linux server space and then divide it up into smaller sections and rent out those sections.

Your customers treat you like you are the hosting company; however, all of the technical aspects are still taken care of by the parent company (the company you are renting your server from). Essentially, you are the middle man.

Quick Tips to a Successful Linux Reseller Hosting Business

Here are a few quick tips that will help you succeed:

Start Small

The number one mistake is that most new resellers start off aiming for the stars and when they don’t get there in the first month, they get frustrated and quit. All you need to do is concentrate on adding one client at a time.

Plus, if you got 100 new clients the first day, do you really think that you could effectively handle each one right away?

Get The Tools

When running a Linux reseller hosting business, it is important to understand that you will be dealing with all aspects of running a business from advertising to client management and billing.

There are certain tools that will make managing your clients and billing a much easier process. In fact, many hosting companies that offer reseller accounts have a great package of tools to help you get started.

Don’t Forget About Marketing

So many resellers get caught up dealing with the technical aspects of hosting, even if they don’t need to, and never get around to actually marketing.

If your potential customers don’t know who you are or what you are offering, then they will never use your service. It is important to not get so caught up in planning for the future that you forget about today.

Get Your Own Server… Eventually

In the long run, getting your own Linux server will drastically improve your bottom line. However, this may not be something that you want to do right away.

First, you need to consider what would happen if you buy a server, or servers, right away and your business never gets off the ground. How will you recoup the investment that you put into the server?

The second thing to consider is that running and maintaining your own server takes a lot of work, especially when making sure that they are always up and running and well-maintained (especially when it comes to security and updated software). This does take a bit of technical skill.

So while you should definitely invest in a server, it shouldn’t be done right away.

JSP Web Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 23:43:18 +0000

JSP Web hosting is one of the many options that are available to web developers.

Many web developers rely on JSP to create dynamic websites, as well as provide additional enhancements to their sites. With a quality JSP web hosting service, webmasters can easily manage and operate java server pages.

However, it is important to consider that JSP is very similar to ASP. This means that many ASP web hosting providers could also potentially fulfill the needs of a webmaster that relies on JSP.

The reason that JSP has become more popular as a server-based language is because it utilizes simply tag-side codes that are used in conjunctions with XML and HTML to create web pages and websites that do not require any additional platform.

This also means that the website will look nearly identical on every screen, regardless of what platform is being used.

A JSP web hosting provider is important to utilize to ensure that your JSP website is correctly compiled into Java servlets. The web container then recognizes the Java servlet, and will integrate it into the server. Java server pages will always work the best on a JSP web hosting server because it is specifically designed to handle JSP’s.

These specified web hosts will help to ensure that the creation of servlets is done effectively, and that the server has additional helpful applications like Enterprise JavaBeans.

It is important to understand that not every host is JSP supported because there can be a high learning curve involved, as well as a number of important server software upgrades. If a web hosting services support staff isn’t familiar with JSP or how to operate Java servlets, they will often shy away from hosting clients that work primarily with JSP.

When searching for the right JSP web hosting service for you, there are few things to keep in mind.

First, with the continual advancement in data transfer speeds and design applications, it is important to find a host that has up to date technology. The best companies will always stay on top of these important technologies.

While an ASP web hosting service can fill your needs, a JSP web hosting service will ensure that you have all of the technologies that you need. It also ensures that if you need assistance from the support staff, they will be able to offer help with JSP specific problems.

No related posts.

Joomla web hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 05:32:50 +0000

Joomla web hosting is becoming more popular every month. Joomla is consistently one of the most popular content management systems across the internet.

While there are no “special” hosting needs in order to create a Joomla website, there are some important characteristics that a quality Joomla web hosting service has.

Here is a quick look at what you should expect from this hosting service.

Most importantly, you need to make sure that your hosting provider has at least the minimum requirements to effectively use Joomla.

This includes MYSQL databases, Perl 4.X, Apache 2.X, and ideally Fantastico. Fantastico is not necessary, but will allow you to install Joomla wherever and whenever you want with only a few clicks.

Additionally, some Joomla web hosting services offer free Joomla installation and configuration. This will ensure that Joomla is set up to run as efficiently and as effectively as possible.

Some Joomla web hosting services will also provide unique Joomla templates that you get access to for free. Many of these hosting services that provide a number of Joomla-specific benefits also ensure that their servers and databases are specifically designed to handle the resources that Joomla needs to run at an optimum level.

Additionally, Joomla web hosting companies also have a technical support staff that will be able to help you when you need assistance that is specifically related to Joomla. This can save a lot of time that would otherwise be spent searching through forums.

Granted, Joomla has a very active community that is always more than willing to lend a hand, but if you need a fast answer, then you may not want to rely on the various forums that are available. Many also offer free Joomla tutorials.

Since Joomla websites often create a large amount of user-interactivity and has web 2.0 features that can cause huge spikes in visitors, you need to make sure that your hosting plan is designed so that your website will be able to handle these spurts in traffic.

Additionally, if your Joomla website continues to rise in popularity, you need to make sure that your Joomla web hosting service provider can quickly and easily upgrade your hosting package if you need a larger amount of resources on a consistent basis.

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IRC Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:39:46 +0000

Finding IRC hosting can seem a little difficult if you do not know where to look, and even more frustrating if you find out that you didn’t need this hosting in the first place.

If you are searching for IRC hosting only because you want to start your own channel, there is a good chance that you don’t need a full IRC host. Rather you can just start your own IRC channel through somewhere like efnet or freenode.

This is perfect if you only need one channel and will not have a large amount of people on it at one time.

However, if you do need this hosting, then here are some tips to finding a quality IRC host.

Ignore Most Hosting Services

It is important to know that most hosting services do not allow IRC hosting. In fact, many explicitly state it that they do not support it.

This is even true if you are renting a dedicated server. Just because it is your dedicated server, that doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you want with it.

Look Specifically for IRC Hosting Services

The easiest way to find a good IRC host is to search for hosting companies that specifically advertise or promote this type of hosting.

Not only will you know what services allow this hosting, but these hosting services also have the specific knowledge that it takes to support your server.

Get Shell Access

If you are looking for complete control over your IRC experience, it is critical to get a shell account. Fortunately, most of these companies offer shell access to your dedicated server.

Find Out What You Can and Cannot Do

Even with shell access, there are certain things that your IRC hosting service still may not let you do.

Some common things that are often prohibited include: Ddos Bots, Agobots, SDBots, XDCC Bots, iroffer, scanning, flooding, exploiting bots, and xh (also known as process hiding).

However, you will normally be allowed to utilize processes like: eggdrop, psotnic, non-contagious botpacks, wraith, bnc applications and others.

Finding quality IRC hosting doesn’t have to be difficult. First, you need to make sure that you really need this hosting service and not just a channel. If you do, make sure that you have shell access and can run all of the processes that you would like to run.

Drupal Hosting

Hosting PHP

Hostorian — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:21:15 +0000

One of the biggest decisions that are made when deciding to choose either a Linux or Windows server, is whether you want to work with PHP or ASP.

PHP hosting is more than readily available since Linux has been dominating the market for some time. While both languages can create dynamic content websites, they are inherently different.

PHP hosting price

Hosting PHP is always going to be a cheaper option. To use ASP you need to have IIS installed and it gets very pricey fast.

PHP runs on Linux which is open source and completely free of charge.

Dealing with your database is another area where price becomes an issue. With ASP, you will work through MS-SQL which must be purchased separately. PHP uses MySQL which is also a no cost solution.

In the price battle, PHP hosting will always win.

PHP and database connectivity

PHP is very flexible in regards to database connectivity. It is open-sourced and allows you to connect with a variety of database types even though MySQL is the most popular. ASP has limited flexibility and is always used with MS.

PHP compatibility

PHP hosting is compatible with a number of platforms including Linux, Unix, Windows, and Solaris. ASP is “almost” solely used on a Windows platform.

Base language

PHP is based upon C++. C++ is still considered to be one of the best programming languages of all time, which is one reason that PHP caught on so quickly.

ASP is much more similar to Visual Basic which is true for most Microsoft tools. The preference of either in this area is solely opinion. Neither are really “better” than the other, just preferable.

Additional miscellaneous factors about PHP hosting

There are some additional factors that developers may also want to keep in mind.

The first is that since PHP is open source, which means that all future upgrades to software will be free to get, the same is true of additional features. On the other hand, as with most Windows products, extra features are going to cost you.

ASP seems to consistently get the nod when it comes to speed. ASP is normally considered to crush PHP when it comes to speed, which is becoming more important as Google and other such engines factor in website loading speed in their SEO formula.

Hosting PHP will always be one of the most popular options. It is free, largely compatible, and based on C++. All of these characteristics are excellent for developers.

Google Web Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 05:14:15 +0000

Google web hosting has become much more popular since they abandoned the Google Page Creator in favor of Google Sites, which was launched in February of 2008.

Advantages of Google web hosting

Google sites offers everyone a chance to start their own website for free. Google web hosting, with Google Sites, has a number of great features, especially for a free service, but has some limitations as well.

Google Sites has some of the most important Web 2.0 and monetization tools that every website needs to succeed. This includes:

Native RSS feeds
Custom templates for both pages and entire sites
Excellent default template
Revision history that allows you to look at previous versions of your website
Multiple layout options
Access to a library of custom widgets and gadgets to increase the functionality of Google Sites

Your Google web hosting websites are also fully integratable with some of Google’s most prized applications including Google Adsense, Webmaster Tools, YouTube, Google Video, Google Docs, Google Maps and more. All of this allows for a more interactive website as well as a way to monetize your site.

For a free website, Google web hosting offers a lot more than most.

Disadvantages of Google web hosting

There are some limitations to keep in mind as well.

The first is the size of your website. Google Sites only gives you 100 MB of storage, however if you are a paid Google Apps client, you get 10 GB of storage.

There is also not a lot of customization outside of the provided website themes. This means that you do not get to customize the CSS, template, and does not allow you to add any Javascript.

It is also important to consider how important a domain name is.

A web address with Google Sites will look like similar to this: http://sites.google.com/site/sitename/ instead of a traditional domain that you would otherwise purchase. Your site-name must also be at least 6 characters and can only be alphanumeric.

It is also important to consider that, as with other free hosting companies, you do not actually “own” the website. You cannot move it and Google can shut it down at any time.

As long as you follow the terms of service, you will be fine, but it would be devastating to work hard on your website and create a solid level of traffic only to have your website shut down.

Plus, since you don’t have complete control over the website, you cannot create page re-directs to help funnel your traffic to a new website.

Choosing whether or not Google web hosting is right for you is a decision that only you can make. There are both beneficial features and potential drawbacks that you need to consider.

No related posts.

Game Server Hosting

Hostorian — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:32:48 +0000

Game server hosting will continue to become more specialized as long as gamers continue to swarm the internet.

Online gaming has become one of the most popular forms of gaming, and the need for a quality, reliable game server host is more important than ever.

The key to choosing the right gamer server hosting for you is to find the right server type that has the right amount of server space to keep your gaming website popular among your users.

Here are a few tips to choosing the best game server hosting to fit your needs.

What Type of Game Server Do You Need?

If you are just looking to find a server for you and friends to use, then there are a number of game server hosting services that offer packages based upon how many people will be using the server.

This is often the perfect solution for a clan that wants to all be playing in the same place. These servers will almost always have the game software pre-installed so that your clan can start playing right away.

A dedicated server is often used by gaming enthusiasts and small businesses. Dedicated servers will allocate a node to each game that is being played on the server. If you are using a dedicated server for your gaming site, you will want to make sure that you can get at least 10 or 15 nodes in order to create a well functioning site.

Regardless of what you choose, always make sure that you choose a game server hosting plan that can be upgraded or downgraded if needed.

A Little Extra

Gamers are always looking for the little extras that take their gaming experience for good to great. Additional applications are often utilized to attract more gamers.

For example, gamers want to be able to socialize and be able to come back to the same gaming site.

This means that you need to keep in mind that your server may also want to be used for additional applications like real-time chatting or to host an online forum.

Most gaming servers provide you will “specialty controls” such as choosing the map(s) that will be hosted on the server as well as other common options.

Striking a Balance

Once you have decided what kind of game server hosting environment that you need, such as a dedicated server, it is time to create a balance between price and extras.

Some extras are worth the additional expense, however some may not be. It is up to you to make the final decision.

Flash Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:04:09 +0000

Flash videos have become an integral part of many of the most successful websites in the world. People who visit websites want to be able to do more than just read what you write, but rather listen and watch the content.

With the increase in videos online, many webmasters still haven’t been able to decide whether or not to host their flash content on their own server, or with a 3rd party flash hosting service.

There are several potential drawbacks to hosting a flash video on your own site. One of the biggest is that videos are big and can quickly eat up your resources.

For this reason, many people are looking for outside flash hosting websites and Youtube and similar free sites are often considered.

When considering a free flash hosting service, there are some drawbacks to keep in mind.

Lower quality video conversion

With free 3rd party flash hosting websites, you lose a large amount of control over how your video is displayed.

This means that they convert your video to another format which will reduce the quality of the video. This is especially important if your video has small details that are important for that viewer to see.

Aspect Ratio

Since you have no control over the conversion process, there is a chance that the aspect ratio will be thrown off.

While 3rd party sites try to keep your video looking good, if your video ends up looking squished or some of the video gets cut off, then there is not much that you will be able to do in order to remedy the situation.

3rd party flash hosting services are gaining in popularity as video becomes more a focused presence online. While there are definite advantages to using a 3rd party flash hosting service, there are some drawbacks that need to be kept in mind as well.

Fast Web Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 05:23:17 +0000

Fast web hosting can mean a lot of different things to different people. So when looking for fast web hosting, it is important for you to decide exactly what you are looking for.

It seems like every other day, someone poses the question, “who are the fastest hosts?” However, they all get different answers, and for good reason. Lets take a look at what “fast” can mean.

Transfer Time

When people look for fast web hosting, they often focus on the transfer time.

However, many people don’t realize that the transfer time is often not the problem, but rather request connections are what really slow things down.

Additionally, the transfer time can be largely affected by how far you are away from the data center or server. You cannot know how far away your website visitors are, so transfer time is based upon a variable that you cannot entirely control.

Request Connections

Some people argue that focusing on the request connections is the best way to determine whether or not you have a fast web hosting provider or not.

For example, when you are downloading a 5 KB file, transferring the 5 KB is not what slows the process down, but rather the amount of time that it takes to “get ready” to transfer it.

Most websites require users to download many different elements to display the webpage correctly. The connection time for each element can add up quickly and really slow down your website.

This makes request connections time much more important than most people think.

Additional Factors

There are a slew of other factors that can determine whether or not you have a fast web hosting provider or not. This includes: total bandwidth of the network, data transmission speed, the server configuration, the servers hardware, and even the overall data center infrastructure.

With all of these variables to choose from, many companies claim to be “fast web hosting” services, but many aren’t.

While it can be difficult trying to find out which hosts are the fastest there are several different ways to do research. The most common is to either post a question in forums, and search forums to see if the question has already been answered.

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Email Hosting

Hostorian — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 09:09:12 +0000

Many people choose to use the email hosting services that are provided by their web hosting providers.

Most of the time, your web host may have all of the features that you need in an email hosting service, but it is still important to make sure.

It seems like every year brings another new email application that could make your business run smoother.

Let’s take a look at some of the important features that email hosting services need to provide to fit most webmasters needs.

The Correct Email Address

Think about what you want your email address to be as well as how many you need. Some email hosting providers may offer a limited number of email addresses, while others offer you as many as you want.

Do you want your domain name to be part of your email address? Many email hosting providers cannot offer this, while your web hosting provider can.

It is important to have a fairly good idea of how many email addresses you will need as well as what you want it to look like.

Spam Protection

Spam is an unfortunate side-effect of having an email address and addressing this issue early can save you a lot of headaches later.

Spammers work hard to stay ahead of the technological curve, so you need to make sure that your email hosting provider is doing the same. There is nothing worse than having a virus sneak in and destroy your network or server unnoticed.

An Autoresponder

Are you going to need an email service that provides an autoresponder?

Many people waste countless hours replying to the same types of emails over and over. An autoresponder could save a lot of time.

For example, if you are running a service based business, you can use an autoresponder to automatically respond to price inquiries with a standardized list of prices. This way, your sales staff can spend their time with customers who are taking a more active interest.

Email Redirection

Email redirection is primarily used by small business with only a small number of employees.

For example, if you have 5 different email addresses for different departments and are responsible for checking all of them, then all five can be directed to one address. This way, to check all five, you only have to check the one.

Email hosting is a popular option and can streamline your businesses communication, however you need to make sure that you get all of the features that you will need.

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Dedicated hosting service

Hostorian — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:38:38 +0000

As a webmaster, there will come a day when you will no longer be able to rely on a shared server and a dedicated hosting service will be what you need. When it comes to a dedicated server, there are some important factors that could weigh heavily on your decision.

Important Factors to Choosing the Right Dedicated Hosting Service for You

Just a few factors to keep in mind while choosing a dedicated hosting service:

The Operating System

Choosing the right operating system is very important because it will determine what kinds of applications that you will be able to run on your server. There are many different platforms that you can choose from and they have all their particular advantages such as price, compatibility, usability, and more.

Data Transfer and Backup Ability

If you choose a dedicated server, it is important to make sure that your server has the right rate of data transfer to meet your needs; otherwise, there is a greater chance that your server will crash or your website will load slowly.

Keep in mind that if you have a data transfer rate that is far beyond your needs, you may want to consider downgrading because you are paying for it whether you need it or not.

It is also important that your dedicated server has the ability to backup and store information. Your backups are a lifesaver if your website crashes, and it is the only way to get it up and running again in a quick and efficient manner.

Server Automation

It takes a bit of technical knowledge to manage your own dedicated server, which is why many people choose to use a managed dedicated server.

A managed dedicate hosting service allows you to get the benefits of a dedicated server without having to maintain it yourself. This includes not having to worry about security updates, operating system updates, and other critical software updates.

Monitoring Services

When choosing a dedicated hosting service, it is important to make sure that your server is reliable and that your website will always be accessible.

This is why most dedicated hosting services have a monitoring service which means that you will always know if your server crashes or website goes down. A monitoring service also helps you keep an eye on potential problems and errors that destroy your site.

Once you start your search for the right dedicated hosting service, keeping these four factors in mind will help you choose the right dedicated hosting service for you.

cPanel Reseller Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:46:35 +0000

When it comes to running a reseller hosting business, many people turn to cPanel. cPanel reseller hosting has several advantages over using other popular platforms.

The cPanel market share has continued to grow, and looks to be a dominant force for years to come.

Advantages of cPanel Reseller Hosting

Here are some of the advantages of cPanel reseller web hosting:

Popularity

If you are just starting your reseller business, it is often useful to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, while remaining versatile. cPanel is a well known platform that most people not only recognize, but are comfortable with. By leveraging the popularity of cPanel, you can more easily attract additional clients.

Lower Overhead

When you choose to be a cPanel reseller hosting provider, you have the advantage of needing less overhead than with many of the alternatives. Your customers, using cPanel, will be able to update their contact information, backup their website, change passwords, view their own error logs, and much more.

This makes it easier for your system administrators and support staff to focus on other aspects of the hosting experience.

Allows Customers to Track Themselves

Another advantage of being a cPanel hosting reseller is that your customers get important real-time data.

Your customers will be able to instantly see a number of statistics about their website including: disk space used/available, bandwidth used/available, sql resources used/available, email resources, and domain information.

This lets them know when they will need more resources and makes it easier for them to know when they need to upgrade their package.

Using WHIM News, you can also send messages to any domain owner on the server. This makes communication much easier, especially with time sensitive information such as scheduled downtime or security issues.

Increased Security

Since all of your users will be utilizing cPanel, they will only be able to control their own domain space and access functions that will only affect their own account.

Since this can limit their software installation options and eliminate shell access, you will stay in full control over your server at all times. This makes security across the server much easier to maintain, as well as ensuring that each webmaster is not affected by another webmaster’s changes.

With cPanel reseller hosting, you not only get to promote a well-known and trusted name, but also get all of the advantages that cPanel has to offer. This list is only four of the many advantages that cPanel reseller hosting has to offer.

Cheap VPS Web Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:21:45 +0000

Jumpline offers six months FREE VPS hosting. Check them out!

Cheap VPS web hosting is the perfect solution for anyone who needs more than what a shared hosting package has to offer, but still does not need the additional resources of an entire dedicated server. VPS or virtual private server is when a single server is divided into several virtual servers which allows multiple websites to run simultaneously. Cheap VPS web hosting is considered to have the advantages of a dedicated server, because each user has the sense of working with a dedicated server, while also getting the advantage of shared hosting, which is that several webmasters share resources to reduce the overall cost. There are several other advantages that makes cheap VPS web hosting a great option.

Control

VPS hosting gives every user the ability to have complete autonomy over the administrative tools which includes the graphical interface, command line, and support services. This makes working on a VPS very similar to using a dedicated server.

Resource Flexibility

A VPS gives users the chance to completely control the flexibility and availability of a range of resources. This means that every user can have their requirements met at all times.

Increased Security

VPS allows you to avoid the increased security risks that are associated with shared hosting. This means that users can feel more comfortable with a high level of security for every individual website. The two biggest threats that VPS can help avoid are denial of service attacks as well as unauthorized access.

Migration and Updates

Cheap VPS web hosting allows webmasters to easily migrate from one physical server to another. This is because of the control over server configuration. The same is true when looking at the ease of upgrading applications and platforms at any time.

Installation Freedom

Since every person on a virtual private server has their own separate chunk of hosting space, they can use whatever operating system they want. They can also add any additional applications and software tools that they may need. This allows for much more freedom than a shared server because the webmasters are not reliant what the server administrator adds to the server. Cheap VPS hosting has proven to be the perfect compromise of shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Users still leverage the power of numbers to take down the price, but also get the added benefits of having a dedicated server such as flexibility, control, and security.

Jumpline offers six months FREE VPS hosting. Check them out!

Cheap Reseller Hosting

Hostorian — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:02:00 +0000

It seems like becoming a hosting reseller is one of the most popular ways that people try to earn a full-time income online.

However, the biggest mistake that most people make is that they look for a cheap reseller hosting package and start reselling. Then after a few months, they realize one of two things.

First, they simply cannot create a competitive advantage based on price (which should be obvious because they are the middle man).

The second thing that they realize is that while they might come close to competing based on price (with sliver thin profit margins), their parent company simply isn’t a good hosting company. They offer poor customer service or have a lot of down time or just slow load times.

When you choose a cheap reseller hosting plan, you are likely to get what you paid for. Unfortunately, you didn’t pay much, and you aren’t getting much in return.

While a cheap reseller hosting package may seem like a great idea, it is important to look beyond the price. Here are some common problems that you may encounter when searching for your next cheap reseller hosting package.

Overloaded Servers

Servers have a limited number of resources that are available at any given time. One way that some hosting companies profit from creating reseller accounts is by overloading servers.

When this happens, websites load slowly (if at all) or the server could just crash. Either way, this is not a recipe that will make your customers happy.

Get Your Customers Stolen

While this shouldn’t happen, it is an inevitability. When one of your customers contacts the parent hosting companies support staff, they may ask about a different hosting option.

Before you know what happened, your parent company just stole your client. Is this a common problem? Not really, but it happens, and it is much more likely to happen if you choose your reseller hosting package based solely on price.

No Stability

Just because a company offers a cheap reseller hosting package, it doesn’t mean that they will be around forever.

It is always a better idea to go with a proven parent hosting company that has been around for at least a few years and has a track record of successful resellers. This shows that they are a stable company and also hints that they take care of their resellers and help them grow.

If you choose a new hosting company and they flounder, for one reason or another, then you have just lost all of your customers.

While choosing a low-cost reseller hosting package is ideal, you shouldn’t necessarily jump at the cheapest reseller hosting package on the market.

Cheap Linux Hosting

Hostorian — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 03:56:08 +0000

There are many reasons that cheap Linux hosting is always in high demand. The two most popular platforms are Linux and Windows, but Linux has been able to keep a firm grip on the top spot.

Reasons that Cheap Linux Hosting is More Popular Than Windows

Linux offers a variety of advantages to webmasters that Windows has not been able to duplicate. Here are some of them:

Price

For many people, the price alone is enough of a difference, especially if they have little experience with either platform. Since Linux was created with the GNU General Public License, anyone can access it. This has led to a variety of different Linux based platforms to suit a particular area of focus including: Red Hat, Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux.

Compatibility

Compatibility is a big reason that cheap Linux hosting is the preferred option.

If you are working on a Linux server and for some reason have to move to a Windows based server, the transition is comparatively simple. However, if you start out on Windows based server, the transition to Linux almost isn’t even worth the trouble.

Linux makes moving to another platform very simple, whereas Windows makes it a hassle.

Support

Linux has a very large and supportive community that continues to refine Linux and continually make improvements. Even large companies like HP, IBM, Nokia, and Motorola use Linux and are dedicated to helping it grow and expand as the premier option.

Security

Over the years, Windows has gotten a bad reputation regarding security. Linux on the other hand has always been considered very secure. One of the benefits of such a large supportive community is that when a threat is noticed, it is quickly fixed. Linux has the benefit of being both simple yet powerful, making it a much more secure option.

Stability

Linux is well known for being one of the most stable platforms available. Its stability comes from a variety of factors including the supportive community. However, one of the biggest reasons that Linux always seems to be stable is because it needs very few resources to operate. Windows, on the other hand, consumes much more resources, even when it is inactive.

Cheap Linux hosting will always be in high demand as it continues to boast a number of advantages over its closest competitors.

Wiki Hosting

Hostorian — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 19:13:00 +0000

Wiki hosting is a trend a that continues to grow and is sure to become even more popular in the future.

The concept of wiki is to have content created by users. They are responsible for adding, editing, and even originally creating content.

With the increasing popularity of wiki, wiki hosting has become much more popular as well. People can either use free wiki hosting services or host the wiki on their own domain.

There are several important decisions that need to be made in order to ensure that you are happy with all phases of your wiki project.

What software do you want to use?

There are a variety of different open source and commercial wiki software available to people looking to start their own wiki website.

If you plan on hosting wiki on your own site, you need to make sure that your hosting provider allows you to use the software that you want to use. Many hosting providers have a list of wiki software that you can quickly and easily load onto your website. For example, BlueHost offers free Tikiwiki installation.

If you are looking for a free wiki hosting site that allows you to create a website without purchasing a domain name, they will often not tell you what wiki software they use. However, you can often get a good idea of what they are using by simply exploring the site.

Do you want to use the most popular wiki software?

Some webmasters prefer to use popular open source software because there is a large community of developers and supports. This often means that new versions can be created and released quickly and can include changes that the community wants to see made.

Three of the most popular wiki software include MediaWiki, TikiWiki, and DokuWiki.

MediaWiki is considered to be the most popular wiki software, and is used by Wikipedia. Tikiwiki has also proven to be a very powerful wiki resource and it is extremely versatile. Dokuwiki is not included in Fantastico which has prevented it from becoming as popular as some of the other options.

Some webmasters prefer to get their own wiki software designed and tailored to their own needs, or simply use a commercial wiki software.

If you want to use this type of wiki software, it will not be possible to use a free wiki hosting website. Rather you would need to host it with your own domain name.

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WAP Hosting

Hostorian — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 04:06:11 +0000

With the rise in WAP hosting websites, many people have turned to these sites in order to create their own mobi websites.

When it comes to hosting these sites, there are two basic options. You can host them on your own domain, or use one of these ever growing hosting websites.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and each web master needs to make a choice based on their individual needs. Here is a quick look at both hosting a mobi website on your own domain and using a WAP hosting site.

WAP Hosting Using Your Current Domain and Hosting Company – Biggest Advantage – Can Have Only One Website

If you already have a regular website that you simply want to be made more mobile friendly, then there is no need to recreate it and use a separate company.

All you need to do is set up a sub domain such as mobile.yourdomain.com. Next you need to create a PHP file or files that will automatically prepend and append all of your website pages.

Then using .htaccess, you can enable the prepends and appends. When done correctly, your website will quickly become a functioning mobile website without much work. Many examples of these PHP scripts and how to use them can be found online.

WAP Hosting Using Your Current Domain and Hosting Company – Biggest Disadvantage – Your Hosting Provider

Your hosting provider may not provide this type of hosting. WAP (wireless information protocol) is the method that is used to deliver information to users that are utilizing the internet from their phone.

While most hosting companies are not a problem, some still do not have wap hosting abilities.

Using a Separate WAP Hosting Service – Biggest Advantage – Website Builders

Almost every one of these hosting services provides a website builder that is geared toward creating a website that is meant for only mobile access.

This can be important because many phones have problems correctly reading the CSS, PHP, and HTML within the website design. This means that your website will come out looking jumbled and disorganized.

The website builders are specifically designed to help you create a mobile website that will look great on every phone.

Using a Separate WAP Hosting Service – Biggest Disadvantage – Less Control

There are a lot more free WAP hosting sites than commercial ones.

If your mobile website is designed solely for profit purposes, you should always hesitate a moment when your website is placed in someone else’s hands.

What if your free hosting website shuts down? Will you be able to access your website so that you can copy it and move it somewhere else?

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Rails Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:27:55 +0000

If you have been jumping from provider to provider trying to find a really good rails hosting service, then you start to wonder why finding a high quality rails host seems so difficult.

The short answer is a very simple one.

Rails are expensive for hosting providers, and can be a giant pain to deal with.

Large hosting companies tend to have problems staying up to date on the latest ruby and rails software and getting it installed in a timely manner.

It also means that they need to have a support team that actually understands ruby and rails and can answer your questions intelligently.

It also means that they need to continually create and update help documents as well as continue to provide reliable uptime for all computers.

In fact, many hosting companies have only added the option to use ruby and rails because so many people were trying to custom install it for themselves and would end up crashing the server.

Rails is really made to be used only on a dedicated server. This allows the server to spit out data whenever it is needed.

Rails sucks up a large amount of RAM in order to keep speeds up, but that is incredibly difficult to do in a shared hosting environment.

Shared hosting companies will normally do an Apache/FastCGI stack by dumping the dispactch.fcgi processes every 60 seconds and hoping that no one really needs the bandwidth that they sign up for. The only way to cram hundreds of sites into a shared hosting environment is to use PHP.

With all this in mind, there are a few indicators that you can keep an eye out for, which will let you know that you have found a solid rails hosting provider.

Shell Access

Shell/SSH access is 100% critical. If you cannot get to the actual command line, then why waste your time.

Updated Speed

To be a good rails hosting provider, they must have both speed and updates. If they do not update their servers quickly, they will be left open to unnecessary security threats.

Additionally, if the sever is on CGI alone, it will be painfully slow. Make sure that the host has FastCGI or SCGI, and if you are really lucky – Mongrel.

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Podcast Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:56:43 +0000

Podcast hosting offers a variety of options, all of which have their their pros and cons.

Some people prefer to host their podcast on their main website. Other people use an additional domain for only podcasts. Some people use free hosting services, and others pay for dedicated podcasting services.

Here is a quick look at all four to help you decide which avenue is right for you.

1. Podcast hosting on your own website

People who choose to upload their podcasts directly to their website do so to keep everything in one place.

As a general rule, this not an option that most people should use. This is especially true once their podcasts gather a large following of fans.

You will quickly burn up a lot more resources than you would expect and soon be paying overage fees to your hosting company. There is nothing worse than having a popularity surge, only to find out later that you can’t pay the hosting bill.

The average half hour, basic talk show is going to have a file size of around 15MB if it is encoded at 64 kbps. If you have a daily show with only 10 subscribers, you will be using 5 GB of bandwidth and use a ½ GB of space every month.

2. Separate Domains

Using a separate domain for hosting isn’t a bad idea. It gives you a centralized location of all of your podcasts, and makes them easy to control.

Unfortunately, you can run into some of the same problems as you do with podcast hosting on your own website.

Chances are that you won’t go over your bandwidth limits using separate domains, but there is still a chance that could happen.

If you are going to stream your podcasts to your main site, why take the additional risk. If you do hit overage fees, you have accomplished nothing except that you have been paying to host two domains when you could have only been paying for one.

3. Free Podcast Hosting Services

Free podcasting services offer the big advantage of being able to host your podcasts for free.

They will normally add an advertisement to the beginning and end of every podcast.

Additionally, they tend to have strict limits on the bandwidth you can use per month and how much you can upload on a monthly basis.

Another drawback is that over the last 3 years, it seems like many free podcasting hosting services have been shutting down.

The best idea to choose a free podcast service that also has paid opportunities. This increases the likelihood that they will stay in business.

4. Paid Podcast Hosting Services

The biggest benefit of these paid hosting services is that they often grant unlimited bandwidth, which means that you will never be charged for overages. The only limits they put in place are on the amount of podcasts that you can load every month.

Personally, paid podcast hosting services are the best solution. They minimize your risk of paying fees while still affording you the advantages of streaming your podcasts to your website.

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Plesk Hosting

Hostorian — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:15:14 +0000

Plesk has still not been able to overcome the popularity of cPanel and Direct Admin in the world of hosting; however, they are starting to gain momentum.

Plesk hosting has several advantages over its more popular counterparts. Unfortunately, most of the benefits only help the administrator.

If you are hosting your website on your own server, then Plesk should be considered a legitimate option.

It has proven to be one of the most cost-effective options available with a variety of different pricing plans based upon how many domains will be using it. It also has the advantage of being compatible with UNIX, Linux, and Windows.

Unfortunately there are some usability issues that seem to have been plaguing plesk for some time.

1. Poor Data Storage

With plesk hosting, you will be saving files only to the server disk. This increases the likelihood that you will have problems storing larger files.

It also means that the administrator will need to backup their files often which can further perpetuate the storage inefficiencies.

2. Lacks Popular Features

Even with the release of its latest version, Plesk does not feature a Fantastico-like resource. As long as Fantastico is considered to be a “must-have” tool, plesk will always seem to lack ease and features.

Additionally, plesk does not have a simple FTP upload option like cPanel does.

3. Wasting Time on Set Up

The way that plesk is designed, several popular applications have access restrictions automatically applied to them. While this does not stop the administrator from changing these restrictions, it is simply a waste of time.

Unfortunately, if you are a first time administrator, it may take more time than it is worth. A primary reason for this is that plesk has been plagued with security issues in recent versions, and these restrictions are meant to make it a more secure platform.

Plesk is sure to continue drawing in new fans because of its low price point and ability to seem very user friendly for the most part. Once you are comfortable with Plesk, it is very easy to work with and has a very intuitive layout.

Many people will not be able to overcome not having Fantastico with plesk hosting. For those that can live without Fantastico, you won’t have to worry about data storage issues if you try this hosting.

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Ecommerce Hosting Solutions

Hostorian — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:07:12 +0000

coreCommerce is highly recommended by the Hostorian for their excellent software for shopping cart and ecommerce. Check them out!

Choosing from the endless amount of ecommerce hosting solutions that are available online can be an intimidating task.

However, once you take a step back and decide what features and functions are truly important, you will be able to make a much more informed and targeted decision.

What to Expect From Ecommerce Hosting Solutions

A quality ecommerce hosting solution will provide you with everything that you need to effectively run a successful online storefront.

This includes protecting sensitive customer information, managing products and product searches, and creating a user-friendly shopping experience. In order to do this, a number of features are commonly included.

This includes a variety of shopping cart applications, an SSL (Secure Socket Layer), the necessary digital certificates, security support, and PayPal integration.

Additional features that are becoming more common include live customer service chat, polling, guestbooks, email marketing support, and customer review/feedback.

While all of the these features are an important aspect of creating a successful ecommerce website, there is one over-arching factor that determines which ecommerce hosting solution is right for you.

Ecommerce Integration

Ecommerce integration is critical for a successful online store. You need more than just a shopping cart in order to create a successful store.

The ecommerce aspect of your website must be seamlessly integrated into the rest of your website. This creates the best experience for potential customers and allows them to order items with ease.

Products need to be “browsable”, and sorted into logical groups. Every product must also have accompanying information that will help the consumer make their decision.

Many successful ecommerce websites added the storefront after the website was already created, but did an excellent job of ecommerce integration.

When you choose an ecommerce hosting solution, you need to ensure that they provide you with all of the tools that you will need in order to present your products in the best light possible.

A great way to see ecommerce integration in action is to look at the shopping cart itself. Some studies have indicated that at least 60% of all shopping carts are abandoned by the customer before they complete the checkout.

This means that they had chosen their products and started to check out, but never completed the process. This could be because the shopping cart was confusing, and it could be because they were not committed to the product, or an array of other reasons.

By creating good ecommerce integration, website owners can remove these barriers, and make it easier and more comfortable for potential buyers to finish the purchasing process.

Drupal Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:01:45 +0000

Drupal hosting is as easy to find as ever, as long as know what you are looking for. Drupal continues to gain popularity as a CMS, even with WordPress and Joomla catching the eye of so many webmasters.

Drupal can be used with any hosting provider, but only a solid Drupal hosting provider will give you the tools that you need to in order to keep your Drupal website up and running at all times.

Here are a couple of quick facts that could help guide you to the right Drupal hosting provider that will fit your needs.

1. Everyone can host Drupal

Unlike some content management systems, Drupal doesn’t have any special hosting requirements that make it unique or difficult to host.

You can create a Drupal website with any hosting provider that supports PHP and MySQL. However, it is also important to keep in mind that just because everyone can host Drupal, it doesn’t mean that they will all be able to provide you with the resources that you need.

2. PHP MySQL

While Drupal can be supported on a Windows or PostgreSQL server, Linux is still the best platform for Drupal.

It is better to use a hosting provider that supports at least PHP 5.X+ and MySQL5. Any previous versions of PHP and MySQL could lead to some incompatibilities and stability problems with newer modules.

3. Database Response Time and Stability

The way that Drupal is designed, it will make a lot of database queries. This means that you will want to check the database response time of a few hosting providers, and choose among the top 3.

If you opt for a Drupal hosting provider that has slower database response times, it will slow the load time of your website considerably.

Many hosting companies will want to talk about bandwidth and web space, but with Drupal, stability is critical. An average Drupal site will need about 225-275 MB of space and a 10-15 GB data transfer on a monthly basis.

To be safe, it always recommended to have as large of a buffer as possible to ensure long-term Drupal stability.

4. Extras

Drupal hosting users can make their Drupal website much more efficient if they have shell access. While PHP can often achieve the same ends, shell access can make life a lot easier.

Not all hosts will provide shell access, so it is something to look into before making your final decision. Drupal hosting is becoming very popular today, so I encourage you to look into it today.

DotNetNuke Hosting

Hostorian — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 01:49:08 +0000

DotNetNuke hosting seems to be extremely easy to find and extremely difficult to find at the same time. DotNetNuke has a large variety of hosting companies that are dedicated almost entirely to the DotNetNuke community.

With so many options, it is surprising to see so many DotNetNuke hosting providers not giving webmasters what they need for a well-run DotNetNuke website.

Let’s take a quick look at exactly what you need for a quality DNN website.

1. What Must DotNetNuke Hosting Have – The Specs

The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that DotNetNuke is more heavily reliant on RAM (RAM is used for internal DNN performance caching) than many other CMS alternatives.

Every hosting provider tries to flaunt bandwidth and storage, but neglect to talk about RAM.

A benefit of using a quality DotNetNuke hosting provider is they know exactly what you need. In fact, some hosting services will tweak the application pool to set DotNetNuke to cache to memory rather than to a disk.

Since DNN can quickly become resource heavy, it is important to plan out your websites future in order to determine the right DotNetNuke hosting options that are right for you.

Keep in mind that many shared hosting plans do not scale well, which means your site could go down if your website suddenly becomes popular and traffic surges become common.

DotNetNuke 5.0+ are based upon ASP.NET 3.5 support and will access at least 1 SQL server database. Remember, these are minimum requirements, so plan accordingly.

2. Full Trust Mode and a Dedicate Application Pool

It is important to find a DNN host that provides dedication application pools and supports full trust mode.

A dedicated application pool will ensure that your website is isolated from the other websites on the server and prevents other websites from affecting your website.

Without full trust mode, some DNN modules may not work, especially news feed type modules that require communication with other websites.

3. The Community

The DotNetNuke community is a close one and very helpful if you are willing to listen.

When researching specific DotNetNuke hosting providers, there will be a large amount of honest feedback about almost all of them.

For example, GoDaddy often creates problems for DNN users because they do not allow for DNN to be uploaded to the root folder. On the other hand, PowerDNN seems to get glowing comments everywhere you turn.

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Domain Registration Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 21:43:05 +0000

As more people try to build a website online, many are left wondering whether or not it is worth it to deal with domain registration and hosting.

With more free hosting websites popping up every day, they can seem like the perfect no-cost solution.

Unfortunately, there are a number of advantages to going through with the process of domain registration and hosting that most people do not consider. Here is a quick look at what some of those advantages are.

1. Stability

Once you have completed your domain registration and hosting is acquired, you have complete control over your website.

Since the domain name is yours, you can do anything that you want with it. You could keep the same domain name forever if you want to.

This level of stability simply doesn’t exist with free website hosting companies. Many of them will not provide you with a domain name of your name. This means that if they decide to take down your website, there is nothing that you can do about it.

With your own hosting and domain, this will never be a problem.

2. No Wasted Efforts

If you have spent even a few months building up traffic for your website, you wouldn’t want those efforts wasted.

As long as you own your domain, the traffic that you build will always be able to find your website.

On the other hand, if you do not have your own domain name, you could have your website shut down for nearly any reason. If this happens, you will have wasted all of the time and effort that you spent building up traffic because your website no longer exists.

3. Total Control

As long as you have completed your domain registration, hosting setup and everything is ready to go, you are in total control of your website.

You decide what it looks like, how or if you want to monetize it, where your advertisements will be located, and the colors of your site. You have complete control over everything.

If you using a free hosting service, and do not have your own domain name, your options will be severely limited.

Moreover, most of these services will place profitable ads of their own on your website. This pulls your readers attention away from what you are providing, and points them towards what the free hosting service wants them to focus on.

You will also normally be limited to a certain number of templates that will decide how your website looks.

Unlimited Domain Hosting

Data Center Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:35:51 +0000

Data center hosting is often outsourced; however, a growing number of businesses prefer to keep their data center in house. Their data centers are hosting their networks, servers, and much more.

However, with the large amount of infrastructure that must be combined, there are often aspects of design that are overlooked or simply ignored.

Egenera reported that there are five “blind spots” that create barriers to reliability, flexibility, and manageability. Their research was predicated on discussions with customers, IT vendors, analysts, and industry experts.

Data Center Hosting – 5 Most Overlooked Things About Data Center Infrastructure Management

Here is a quick overview of their findings.

1. Virtualization does not create agility

Data center hosting is often coupled with server virtualization. While it does lend to increased mobility, it exists at the software level only. There are still a large number of administrative tasks that must be done in order to manage the physical infrastructure.

2. Virtualization does not lead to simplification

Virtualization may decrease the number of physical servers as well as allow for the creation of new virtual servers related to data center hosting; however, this is not necessarily simplification.

Virtualization actually creates more virtual objects which require life-cycle management, additional layers of security, and more total moving parts. Simplification is only achieved when a coordinated and organized balance is struck between physical and virtual resources.

3. Virtual Machines Don’t Solve Everything

Many people assume that using virtual machine technologies in relation to their data center hosting will solve their high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) issues.

While the benefit of virtualizations are there HA and DR options, this benefit is marginal if 100% of HA and DR environments are not virtualized.

For this benefit to be full, all applications must become virtualized, including identical VM standby recovery resources. The recovery equipment is already pre-provisioned with VM software and identical to the primary servers.

A better approach is to create a unified HA and DR at the hardware and network level.

4. Provisioning is only assumed for software

While there has been a big advancement in configuration control and the provisioning of images to servers, in a virtual environment, every change creates an equal and associated change to the physical infrastructure. In order to be efficient, automated provisioning must compliment software provisioning.

5. It will never be completely virtual

With data center hosting space, it is important to understand that there will always be a mix of physical and virtual resources. In order to effectively manage a data center, a technology-agnostic approach must be adapted to simplify and unify the physical and virtual environments.

CMS Hosting

Hostorian — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 22:31:00 +0000

When looking over the growing number of CMS hosting options, you will often be bombarded with a lot of information that you do not find relevant. This can make choosing your CMS hosting service a much more difficult process than it needs to be.

In order to better define your needs, there are several questions that need to be answered.

1. What CMS do I want to use?

It is important to identify what CMS you plan on using before you choose your CMS hosting provider.

What happens if you choose a provider that only focuses on one specific CMS, and it is not the one you want?

While most CMS hosting services will give you access to a wide variety of content management systems to choose from, not all of them will. Some of these providers have specifically tailored their servers to be the optimal solution for only one or two content management systems.

Additionally, there are a growing number of commercial CMS designers that will only host websites that use their specific CMS. If you want to use a commercial CMS instead of an open source CMS, than looking for a specific CMS hosting provider could allow you to pay for hosting and get the CMS provided to you at no additional cost.

2. Does The CMS Hosting Provider Meet The Technical Requirements?

Every CMS is a little different. They all use a different amount of resources, and it is important that the hosting provider that you choose gives you enough resources to not only create your website, but gives your website room to grow. Otherwise you will be either searching for a new CMS hosting provider very soon, or be forced to upgrade your account in order to get the resources that your website needs.

3. Not Sure?

If you are not sure what CMS you want to use, the best option is to choose a CMS hosting provider that gives you access to Fantastico. Fantastico can automatically install a number of popular open source content management systems with the push of a button.

Choosing your CMS hosting provider can be a difficult task. However, if you enter into the process with a clear idea of what you need, weeding out providers that do not fit your needs will be easy. By knowing what you do and do not need, you will be able to make an informed decision, and hopefully lead you into a lasting relationship with the perfect CMS hosting provider for you.

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Cloud Hosting

Hostorian — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:21:57 +0000

Cloud hosting has continued to gain notoriety over the past several years. Unfortunately, many people and businesses still do not understand exactly what it is or why they could potentially benefit from it.

Let’s take a quick look at what cloud hosting is, who needs it the most, and what benefits it could offer you.

What is cloud hosting?

Cloud hosting is also know as clustered hosting and is a hosting solution that utilizes virtualization technologies to create load balancing, security, and to manage system resources across multiple servers.

What makes cloud hosting unique is that instead of relying on only one server, websites and applications can use the resources from several servers at once.

Traditionally, websites are limited by the amount of bandwidth they can use, disk space, amount of RAM available, and the processing power of an individual server. With this type of hosting, these limitations are lifted because the infrastructure can expand to meet the needs of the website.

The simplicity of the scalability means that you can add or remove servers whenever it is needed.

Who needs it?

In the past, many websites have fallen victim to their own popularity and suffer because of a burst in traffic or unexpected boom in popularity.

As soon as the website needs more resources than a server can provide, the website can crash. This type of hosting ensures that this does not happen because a website has access to a group of servers that can provide additional resources when they are needed.

Once the website does not need these resources, they can be used by other websites that are hosted on the cloud.

Any additional benefits?

Here are a few more benefits of cloud hosting:

1. Scalability

Since cloud hosting allows for both forward and backward scalability, websites can use as many resources that they may need during bursts of traffic and share resources with others when they are not needed. This eliminates the chance that websites that are hosted on a cloud network will slowly respond or crash because of surges in traffic.

2. Cost

If you have a website that gets a surge in traffic that you are not expecting then your website could crash. On the other hand, you could use enough dedicated servers to make sure that you always have enough resources.

This means that you would either potentially have your site crash, or pay for all of the resources that you MAY need. This means that 95% of the time, you are paying for resources that your website is not using, because they are only needed with traffic spikes.

Think of cloud hosting like you do your electric bill. You only pay for the electricity you use, and the same is true for cloud hosting. You have all of the resources you need to handle a surge in traffic, but only pay for what you use.

No related posts.

Zimbra Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 11:52:04 +0000

More and more business owners and IT managers are searching for a way to delegate the responsibility of hosting their own mail and calendar programs on-site.

Zimbra hosting has emerged as a popular option. Zimbra has proven to hold a number of advantages over some of the more “traditional” business email solutions such as Microsoft Outlook.

Zimbra can be hosted on-site or off-site with unique advantages to both choices. Once a business owner has decided to use Zimbra, the only question left is where to host it.

A Comparison of Hosting Zimbra On-Site vs. Off-Site

Here are a few factors that may help you decide whether you want to host Zimbra on-site or off-site.

1. Features

When hosted on-site, every Zimbra feature is available to both users and administrators.

However, when hosting is moved off-site, there is a real possibility that the administration features can become limited. Fortunately, the features that are limited are primarily limited to the actual domain configuration.

Additionally, many Zimbra hosting companies have a variety of additional features that are made available, which can easily make up the difference.

2. Support

While Zimbra offers support all day and every day, it is up to the business’ own IT team to take care of the server and hardware themselves when it is hosted on-site.

When it is hosted off-site, the support is completely reliant on which hosting provider a business chooses. As long as a good hosting service provider is chosen, support is not needed as often and can result in long term savings.

3. Customization

Obviously, if Zimbra is hosted on-site, the business will have maximum flexibility. The IT team can fine tune the configuration, customize branding and skins, manage policies, and deploy any Zimlet or custom web service.

When trying to customize Zimbra when it is hosted off-site, the customization allowed is completely reliant on the hosting service provider. With that said, they will often allow a high level of customization too.

4. Overall Deployment and Pricing

When hosting Zimbra on-site, you get the maximum level of deployment flexibility. However, this also means that you are responsible for all of the hardware and configuration for the server, as well as integrating Zimbra with other internal systems.

On-site Zimbra hosting costs include all of the server costs, related IT team costs, as well as the cost of Zimbra. The cost of Zimbra is on a per user, per year basis.

Off-site Zimbra hosting still allows for a high level of deployment flexibility. Unfortunately, your involvement with hardware and software maintenance is limited, as well as with feature configuration and other customizations. With off-site Zimbra hosting, the price is reliant on the monthly or annual price that you choose.

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Shared Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:46:35 +0000

Jumpline offers two years of FREE shared hosting. Check them out!

Shared hosting has a number of potential advantages and disadvantages. It seems like everyone prefers to have a dedicated server, but that doesn’t mean that a dedicated server is always the best option.

In order to decide whether or not a shared server is right for you, it is important for you to weigh the advantages and disadvantages for yourself.

Advantages of Shared Hosting

Let’s first take a look at some of the advantages of shared hosting.

1. Cost

This type of hosting is the logical first step when starting a website because it is relatively inexpensive. You can find a solid plan, with unlimited domains, for as little as $10 a month or less.

The reason that the cost is significantly less for a shared hosting plan is because on shared server, there could be 100′s or 1000′s of websites. This allows hosting providers to leverage the large amount of people sharing the server to lessen the price.

2. Ease of Use

With shared hosting, you have no responsibility to maintain the servers, it is the responsibility of the shared hosting company. This means that you will never have to deal with time consuming issues like hardware and software updates, connectivity, and other server administration tasks.

Additionally, these plans also include software that makes managing your website easier such as cPanel and website builders. This also means that you don’t need to worry about the rapid evolution of technology.

Disadvantages of Shared Hosting

And now, to complete the picture, here are some disadvantages of shared hosting.

1. Security

If some other web master on your server makes a mistake or gets their website hacked, the hacker can get access to the server and make a big mess of other websites including yours!

While providers go to extreme lengths in order to maintain the security of their servers, it only takes one stupid mistake from another person on the server to leave the entire server wide open to attack. The worst part is that you often will not even know what happened until it is too late.

2. Slow Performance or Crashes

While this server doesn’t inherently mean that your website will fall victim to slower performances, there is always a chance.

The worst part is that you have no control over it. If another web master gets a sudden burst of traffic, everyone else’s website could grind to a halt because there are no more resources available for the other websites.

Even worse, the server could get overloaded and crash. While there are a number proactive actions taken by a shared hosting provider, crashes are part of the business.

Jumpline offers two years of FREE shared hosting. Check them out!

Top Rated Web Hosts For Shared Web Hosting

Server Hosting

Hostorian — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 22:40:45 +0000

When deciding on your next server hosting company, there are a variety of factors that need to be taken into account.

While many people that just starting out gravitate to services that provide the lowest price, or are free, they are missing the big picture.

Let’s take a quick look at some factors, outside of the pricing, that should weigh heavily on who your next server hosting provider will be.

1. Advertising

This is exclusively found on free server hosting sites. They will place a few advertisements on every page of your website in order to cover the costs of their servers.

While some people are fine with this, it is an important issue. If you are selling something on your website, whether your own or an affiliate, or you are trying to make money from placing adsense or some other PPC type program, then why would you want to complete with the hosts ads?

They are already using the best ad placement to ensure the highest possible CTR for their ads.

2. Reliability

There is nothing worse than going online to find out that your website is nowhere to be found. Any server hosting provider with an uptime of less than 99.5% should simply be ignored.

While server crashes are an unfortunate inevitability, you should always ensure that your server hosting provider has a high uptime as well as a quick response to a server that has crashed.

3. Bandwidth

Bandwidth, traffic, and data transfer are all the same thing. Knowing how much bandwidth you have is an important piece of information to have.

First, it is important to realize that no one can offer “unlimited bandwidth”, although it is a common advertising strategy.

Most websites that are newer will easily use less than 3 GB per month; however, it is important to keep your allowed bandwidth in check. If you go over your allotted bandwidth, you will receive a shockingly large bill.

It is also not a good idea to choose a host that allows you to prepay for overage costs, because you never know if you will hit an overage.

4. Support

No one will appreciate the support provided by their server hosting providers until they need it.

Is support 24-7? More importantly, what is their response time? Are they actually competent, or just a bunch of sales people?

All of these questions tend not to get answered until your website crashes or something bad happens. Make sure that your server hosting provider provides excellent support, and you can get your website back up in minutes instead of hours or days.

Game Server Hosting

Mac Web Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 09:34:50 +0000

With so many Linux hosting services, it can be hard to find a high quality, Mac web hosting solution.

Why choose a Mac web hosting provider?

One of the reasons that most people choose a mac web hosting server over Linux and windows is due to the lack of malware (viruses, trojans, and worms). While these types of malware exist, there are less security bugs to exploit it. This makes mac a great hosting solution regarding reliability and consistently.

In the grand scheme of things, most web servers are Linux. After Linux, windows is the next most popular, and that is followed by UNIX and then mac. Since there are comparatively few mac servers, macs are much less likely to be hacked.

While finding a quality, yet affordable, mac web hosting service can seem like a daunting task, there are some excellent choices that are readily available.

MacHighway

In the middle of 2009, MacHighway was making headlines because they were designed by mac users, for mac users.

Even more impressively, the entire company is 100% wind-powered. They have found a way to build an elaborate support structure while remaining “carbon-neutral”.

Their support team has also stood out as one of the best in business. Everyone on the support staff is a mac fanatic, and has no problem solving one problem at a time over the phone instead of support tickets.

While Mac Highway was grabbing headlines, a number of other excellent mac web hosting services were continuing to build upon their already solid reputation.

Arogo

Arogo serves up a Mac Mini Xserve Dedicated Server for less than $100 a month. The processor is a 1.5 Ghz Intel Core Solo with 1 GB Ram. The server utilizes the Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 Leopard. The total bandwidth maximum is 800 GB.

iWeb

iWeb offers mac web hosting with a Mac Dedicate Server with a core 2 duo 1.83 Ghz processor and 1 GB RAM. The operating system is the Mac OSX Leopard and the bandwidth is restricted to 1500 GB per month. All of this comes in at a ticket of $119.

Solid Space

Solid Space, another mac web hosting service, offers a Mac Mini Dedicated Server at $129 a month. The server has a 1.66 Ghz Intel Core Duo processor and 512 MB of RAM. The operating system is the Mac OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and the monthly transfer (bandwidth) is 100 GB.

Cheap Linux Hosting

Image Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:29:19 +0000

Image hosting websites were once considered to only benefit bloggers that did not have a web hosting account.

However, they are becoming more and more popular for even the most discerning of webmasters. Images can quickly suck up valuable system resources and can also make your website load time much longer.

Another problem, especially for bloggers with limited bandwidth, is that images can consume so much bandwidth that the sites will cause server downtime and deliver an “internal server error” message on a regular basis.

Since so many free image hosting websites are now available, why would anyone upload images to servers and potentially reduce the websites performance?

The only problem, with so many free image hosting websites, is which one or ones to choose.

Image Hosting Websites

Here is a quick look at some of the most popular free image hosting websites.

1. Flickr

Flickr is considered by many to be one of the top photo-sharing and image hosting websites around.

It allows you to upload both images and videos. Then you can securely share your images with friends and family or add them to your website.

Many people prefer to only upload images because the storage capacity is limited as well as the available monthly bandwidth. Free accounts are limited to 100MB and two 90 second videos a month.

2. PhotoBucket

PhotoBucket is another great free image hosting website. Currently, it hosts more than 25 million unique hits a month in the United States, and almost twice that worldwide.

PhotoBucket is another premier image hosting website and allows uploading, sharing, linking, and even searching for photos, videos, and graphics. A free account holds thousands of photos and videos.

3. ImageShack

ImageShack has proven to be a contender in the arena of free image hosting websites. They allow for a little more variety than some of its competitors.

You can upload images and videos like every other site, but you can also upload flash files. Every image needs to 1.5 megabytes or less.

While this may sound limiting, any image larger than 1.5 megabytes will really drag down your websites load time. The same is true for flash files.

4. Pict

Another great image hosting website is Pict. Pict allows you to upload images that are up to 3.5 MB and support a variety of formats including JPG, PNG, and GIF. It can automatically resize your images as well as providing a number of other useful tools.

Guild Hosting

Hostorian — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:21:36 +0000

Guild hosting is a hosting service that specializes in supporting online gaming communities. Guild hosting is also commonly referred to as clan hosting.

The fundamental purpose of this type of hosting service is to allow guild members to be able to easily communicate with each other outside of the game itself.

Why Choose Guild Hosting Over Conventional Hosting?

This hosting, as a niche, arose because it was becoming increasingly complex and labor intensive.

One of the biggest reasons that this hosting has become so popular is because they focus on allowing the guild to be worry-free regarding dealing with design, overhead, and maintenance of a website and gives the guild more time to actually enjoy playing their game.

Guild hosting companies also have a unique understanding of what their clients need. Guilds want to be able to share information between guilds, build alliances, and have open forums.

However, they also want to limit what content is being shared with. It provides the ultimate flexibility, and eliminates the need for an extra website that is just for the alliance, while maintaining the guilds own identity.

Two Must Have Guild Hosting Features

People choose this hosting because it serves their specific needs. This means that there are certain features, beyond traditional hosting features, that are critical to creating a great guild website.

1. Alliance Features

Many of the best guild hosting companies have a variety of alliance features that make forming and maintaining an alliance with other guilds.

Alliance features often include shared forums, events, and “shouts”. This allows the guild to still keep its own identity while sharing as much or as little information as they need to in order to have an effective alliance.

2. Raid Scheduling

Many guilds are forced to use a normal “events calendar” type application. However, there are now much better ways to schedule events such as raids.

Site administrators have demanded more, and many guild hosting companies have happily complied. There are now a number of convenient tools like event sign-up, event/raid points, and participation requirement levels.

Event sign-ups allows the leader to know how many people will be attending the raid, but also gives them a chance to strategize how to best use their resources before the raid begins.

By assigning raid point or event points, you can award members of your guild that are the most active. By setting participation requirement levels, you easily let members know if the raid is considered mandatory or not.

The best part is that all of this information can be shared with alliances if you decide to.

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Grid Hosting

Hostorian — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:14:25 +0000

Whenever web masters are choosing their hosting service, there are normally two qualities that reign supreme: speed and reliability. Grid hosting has become more and more popular, especially as social bookmarking has become more and more prevalent. Unfortunately, many people still do not understand this type of hosting, or why it is a preferable option.

What is Grid Hosting?

This hosting is designed so that your website can handle short surges in traffic that are often the result of social bookmarking or an effective e-newsletter campaign.

Grid hosting is when a hosting company leverages a multitude of servers by combining their resources into a larger computer grid. This has become much more popular as interactivity and social networks become legitimate tools to driving traffic.

What are the Benefits of Using Grid Hosting?

Here are the main benefits of using grid hosting:

1. Reliability

While no one can guarantee 100% up-time, this hosting can get you as close to it as possible.

Since there are so many different available resources that can be called upon, if one server fails, your website can still stay up by relying on the rest of the servers that are part of the grid.

2. No More Migration

Eventually, a dedicated server will be needed if you are running a high traffic website, however there is a good chance that you will even need more resources that a single dedicated server can offer. This means that you will need to migrate your website to an even larger machine.

With this type of hosting, you simply keep integrating more servers into the grid. If a server crashes, you can simply remove it and replace it with another one.

3. Flexibility

Grid hosting offers a large amount of flexibility to anyone hosting a website. If there is a spike in the need for resources, you can leverage available resources throughout the rest of the grid to make up the difference.

You can have multiple servers completing multiple tasks or dedicate each server to only a few tasks.

4. Adaptability

Grid hosting offers vast adaptability to any web master. Most people start out with a shared hosting plan and as they grow will move to a dedicated server and will eventually continue to add servers.

This means that they will need to be able to estimate their future needs in order to prepare for upcoming months. With grid hosting, there is no reason to waste money by over-provisioning or fall short and have your server crash. Grid hosting allows you to only use the resources that you need.

Cloud Hosting

File Hosting Service

Hostorian — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:19:17 +0000

Files’ sizes seem to endlessly grow, and people have turned to online file hosting services to help them store and share important files such as documents and small software applications.

These services help people keep their hard drives free of clutter that is still important, but not used on a regular basis. File hosting services are also great when you need to send or share a file with someone, but it is too large to send via email.

Whatever the reason may be, these services will continue to gain popularity.

Keep in mind some of these services will bombard you with pop ups or force you into a membership before you can download a file. Fortunately, there are still a number of great file hosting services that make everything as easy and simple as possible.

Best Free File Hosting Services

1. FileDropper

FileDropper is a great tool that makes uploading files as simple as possible. It is set up very similar to adding an attachment to an email.

FileDropper also stands out because it allows users to upload 5 GB, which is much more than most other file hosting services.

Once you have completed your upload, you will be given the link and source code so that it can be added to a website or given to someone else so that you can easily share it.

If the file is an image, it will show up on the page which makes sharing or finding the image you want a simple task.

2. FileDen

FileDen is another great free file hosting service. They also offer a direct link to the files which make direct download from a website as simple as possible.

Without an account, you can upload files up to 100 MB. However, many people choose to open a free account because they receive unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, the option to create projects, replace files, and even tracks file and project stats.

3. EasyShare

EasyShare is unique among free file hosting services. You can register and upload your files very quickly and can download the files multiple times.

However, EasyShare actually pays users for their uploads. If your upload gets downloaded 10,000 times you are eligible to receive $20.

You can even add a personalized toolbar to your website and receive cash from their uploads that take place through your toolbar.

Additionally, you receive 10% of others earnings if you are the person that referred them to EasyShare.

The reason that they can do this is because they do have some pop ups and ads that visitors will be forced to deal with. They also offer paid accounts which is another source of profit.

DNS Hosting

Hostorian — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 02:46:38 +0000

DNS hosting is normally not an issue for people who are already using a shared hosting service. DNS hosting is almost always part of the package.

Unfortunately, if you are using either a virtual private server or dedicated server, you will need to find a DNS host, unless your domain name registrar will host your DNS for you.

Once you have set up your DNS hosting for your dedicated server, it is important to keep in mind that most registrars will require that you have at least two DNS servers. This means that you need your initial DNS server, but also use a secondary NS which serves primarily as a backup.

4 Important Criteria For Choosing The Best DNS Hosting Service

1. Physical Location

Most quality DNS hosting services have their DNS servers on networks that are geographically diverse. This helps to make sure that your domain name remains resolvable when the services are off-line. While it is great to have them close, having them on the same network ruins the concept of redundancy.

2. Cost

A large number of these services are “free”. While it is true that a rare few are actually free in every sense of the word, 99% are not. Instead they make their money off of extra services, pounding you with banner ads, or charge you to transfer your domain names to their servers. It is important to understand how much their free service will actually cost you.

3. Records/Domains

Free DNS services often limit the number of domains and DNS records that they will allow you to host, while a small fee will often increase the number. As long as you are not planning on hosting more than a few sites, choosing your service probably isn’t an issue. However, if you plan on having a large number of domains, this information could prove essential in the future.

4. Extras

There are number of extra features that are often provided, however they are not considered to be part of the free hosting. They can include: secondary DNS, Dynamic DNS, Web Forwarding, Email Forwarding, and much more. If any of these additional features are something that you will need, make sure to price them out and compare them before choosing your DNS hosting service.

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Django Hosting

Hostorian — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:29:49 +0000

Django hosting does not have to be difficult to find, as long as you know what you are looking for.

Django operates using a high-level Python framework. Since Django was developed within a fast paced newsroom environment, it focuses on making web development tasks easy and speedy. The primary goal is to make creating a website that is both complex and data-base driven.

However, since it is based almost entirely on Python, finding the right host is critical, otherwise you could have problems.

Common problems include:

The Python interpreter is outdated
Python is not installed at all
Persistent process cannot be used
Some modules that you will need for the programming are not installed and the host will not install if for you.

This means that there are some important pieces of information that you need before you choose a web host.

First, you need to make sure that the host has a recent version of Python. Second, you need to find out if you have access to modules like R.ed, Cheetah, ElementTree, and sqlite. Third, you may need the ability to run a persistent process and a shell account; however this isn’t always possible.

Fortunately, there are several hosts that are geared towards Python programmers specifically. Here is a quick look at excellent web hosts, several of which have been specifically tailored to meet the needs of Django users.

Django Hosting – Specific to Django

1. Django Domain – DjangoDomain was first created because the founders thought that other hosting sites made installation of Django more difficult than it needed to be. This web hosting site was set up to make installing and working Django as simple as possible.

2. Kutoken – Kutoken is a “first class platform for hosting Django applications”. Their virtual servers are optimized specifically for Django, have a 99.95% uptime, and full root access.

Django Hosting – The Top 2

If you are looking for a web host that is more than just the perfect place for Django, then here are two of the most popular options.

1. Web Faction – It seems like you can’t talk about Django hosting without mentioning Web Faction. Web Faction has 50 one-click installations including “Django, Rails, WordPress, Drupal…” Thus far, it is considered to be the most popular Django hosting company and one of the first to “officially support Django.”

2. Linode – If your website is busy enough, you may need to consider using a virtual private server. Linode gives you complete control, but because of the low cost, you will need to manage everything yourself.

No related posts.

cPanel Hosting

Hostorian — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 06:21:44 +0000

cPanel hosting continue to gain the lion share of the marketplace. cPanel has proven itself as one of the premier choices for web hosts everywhere.

It is full of powerful tools that make completing daily tasks quick and easy. The best part about cPanel is that it is simple enough for a newbie, but it has enough power and flexibility to keep professionals more than satisfied.

While there are a number of standout features of cPanel, Fantastico is consistently the most highly rated feature.

Why is Fantastico (included in cPanel hosting) Such a Big Deal?

Fantastico is a 3rd party add on that can quickly become part of the cPanel interface. Fantastico is known for helping you to install a variety of open source scripts within minutes. The best part is that fantastico always ensures that you are installing the newest version of each script available.

Top Rated Fantastico Scripts

Blogging

Wordpress – WordPress has quickly become on of the most popular blogging platforms on the web and fantastico can have it installed within seconds.

B2Evolution – b2Evolution is the perfect blogging platform if you are using multiple blogs on the same domain

Nucleus – Nucleus continues to have a strong following and allows you to create multiple blogs, bookmarklets, multiple authors, and much more.

CMS or Content Management Systems

Drupal – Drupal has one of the largest CMS followings on the internet. It is considered to be one of the most advanced portals that has a large community that offers online help.

Mambo – Mambo is known for its WYSIWYG content editor as well as other features like syndicated news, news feeds, banners, link managers, and more.

PHP Nuke – PHP Nuke is still growing in popularity and offers a wide selection of modules and languages.

SiteFrame – SiteFrame is perfect for the webmaster that is focused on document sharing. It has a wide community to help you with your support needs and allows for the rapid creation of community-based websites.

Customer Support

Help Center Live – This all in one help center features Live Help, FAQ, and Support Tickets and much more.

OsTicket – OsTicket is an email based support center with pop3 login and unlimited email addresses.

Ecommerce

There are a number of ecommerce open source options available with Fantastico including: CubeCart, OS Commerce, ZenCart, and many more.

Discussion Boards For Cpanel Hosting

The two most powerful and most popular discussion boards that are offered are Invision Board and SMF.

Colocation Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:15:44 +0000

Colocation offers a variety of benefits to small and medium sized businesses. While some hosting services have recently downsized their colocation programs and instead pushed for businesses to simply use dedicated servers, colocation will always be an option.

Colocation is generally only a good option for businesses that lack either the financial resources, physical space, or both, to house and maintain their servers.

Colocation originally became popular because businesses didn’t want to spend the money to created their own data center. Aside from the cost and convenience, there are several big advantages that can be gained from colocation hosting.

Power Supply

A quality colocation service will have multiple or redundant power supplies, which are extremely expensive to recreate in-house by small businesses.

A quality hosting company should have a state of the art data center. This will include complete surge and lightning protection, multiple battery backups, and generators that can compensate for an extended power outage.

Hardware Protection

Colocation hosting facilities have the ability to protect your servers, thus your sensitive data, throughout a wide range of conditions. The best colocation facilities are built to withstand all sorts of hazards such as fire, flooding, high humidity, air pollution, earthquakes, and hurricanes.

This protection comes with a high price tag, but that is the benefit of this type of hosting. The costs are shared by multiple businesses all using the same facilities and it is much cheaper than building this type of facility in-house.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth can become very expensive, very quickly. Most of the time, businesses only use a small amount of their total available bandwidth because they must pay for enough bandwidth to handle traffic spikes. When you lease bandwidth from a colocation hosting provider instead of paying for bandwidth for your in-house data center, you will only be paying for the amount you use.

Physical Security

Regardless of the physical security that your business has, there is always a chance that it will get broken into. It could be someone attacking your business, or just a disgruntled employee. All they need to do is get to your data center and copy the information they want to a disk.

Hosting facilities ensure the physical security of your servers, because security is part of their business.

While the potential drawbacks prevent large companies from using colocation hosting services, many small and medium businesses can benefit from using a colocation hosting service.

No related posts.

Coldfusion Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:58:16 +0000

Coldfusion hosting is getting harder and harder to find these days. Coldfusion has continued to lose its market share to more popular open-source options. Many people have been worried about what would become of Coldfusion, since it is a commercial product and does not have a large amount of developers.

However, with Adobe’s release of Coldfusion 9, all worries have been placated for the moment. While Coldfusion 9 once again proved that it is one of the best alternatives available, it hasn’t make Coldfusion hosting any easier to find.

Coldfusion Hosting now features some applications that were newly released in Coldfusion 9.

Server Manager

From a center console, you can now complete administrative tasks simultaneously across multiple servers. This includes creating data centers, applying hot fixes, scheduling tasks, comparing settings across Coldfusion servers, and clearing caches.

Tighter Integration with the Coldfusion Builder

Developers can now create Coldfusion application faster than ever before. They can leverage the Adobe Coldfusion Builder which is an Eclipse-based IDE.

Object Relational Mapping

When you have Coldfusion hosting, you will be able to build database-independent applications while using object relational mapping. This is based primarily on the open source Hibernate library. This allows you to save time by managing database connectivity and logic without any SQL. With the ORM Application Wizard, you can do this without writing a single line of code.

Enhanced Caching

Coldfusion hosting allows you to improve your application performance by caching sections of pages with data that is rarely updated.

CFML and CFC Upgrades

There were several CFML and CFC improvements that will increase performance and error handling. These updates include the onServerStart() method, local variable scope, implicit getters and setters, and nested CFTRANSACTIONS.

Virtual File System Support

With Coldfusion hosting, you will be able to build applications that require less I/O calls by using the new Virtual File System. They can be dynamically generated and executed from memory.

More PDF Functionality

You can reduce the necessary code by adding imaged directly to the PDF within the CFPDF tag. This makes it easier to add watermarks, headers, and footers to all of your PDF files.

Instance Based Licensing

Coldfusion hosting has been made easier because in addition to the physical deployment, you can install Coldfusion 9 on 10 virtual instances within the cloud environment of the hosts choosing.

SiteSell – A Special Web Host

Hostorian — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:28:30 +0000

So what do you expect from a web hosting company? That they provide an online space for your web pages for a decent price, that their servers never go down, that they provide great customer service, right?

Right.

And most web hosts do meet your expectations. But then that’s it.

Your website needs more than just hosting space, bandwidth and uptime. It needs traffic.

Most websites (yes, most) are like a party thrown at the north pole. No one’s there.

Without traffic, a website may as well be non-existent. If no one sees it, does it exist?

Hosting space, bandwidth, uptime, and all the addon features and scripts are a matter of course for all web hosts. But what next?

Traffic from search engines

SiteSell is a web host that helps your site succeed (link opens in a new window) by attracting free, organic search engine traffic. They go beyond just hosting your site and provide tools and guidance that ensure its success.

They do this through their flagship product, called “Site Build It!” or “SBI!” (link opens in a new window) for short.

What is SBI?

That’s a bit hard to define to someone who has not yet been introduced to SBI!. Simply because there is nothing like it, in my experience and knowledge.

In short though, SBI! is a whole set of tools and packages that help you build your website, host it, and make it a success. This success part is important; do pay attention to it. Almost anyone can build a website, or get one built by someone else. It takes more to be successful.

In addition to the tools and packages, Site Build It! is a guide. A guide that will take you by the hand and help you make your website successful. You need to follow the instructions, though. It takes hard work to be successful. No shortcuts here.

But the most amazing thing about Site Build It! is that it empowers common people, with absolutely no technical skills whatsoever, to build successful websites that beat those built by professionals. You don’t need to know the technology or tricks behind building a website, having your own Search Engine Marketing campaign, creating your own Web 2.0 engine to let your site’s visitors add content to your site, or anything else. If you know all this stuff, very good. Now try to forget all that you know, and learn to focus on success. But if you don’t, and especially if you don’t, you still have a level playing field. Why?

Because SBI! does it all for you. The technology part, I mean. Lots of things will happen without you even having to lift a finger. No, scratch that. You will have to lift your finger once in a while. To click, write your content, etc.

And because you haven’t been “corrupted” yet. So you can focus on your success right from the beginning, instead of getting lost in the myriad of technological details.

But you still need to bring your own brain and motivation to the table. You are the one who knows your business, hobby or passion. SBI! doesn’t. You deliver on that count, and SBI! will deliver too.

How will SBI! benefit me?

That’s easy to answer. It will make you successful. The best part is, you define what success is for you. The rest is just details…

Site Build It! will help you if you:

Want to get your website in the top positions in the Search Engine listings
Need more traffic to your site
Want to let your site’s visitors add content to your site
Want to build a site quickly and efficiently, focusing on building your content, forgetting the technological details
Need to help people or simply reach out to them
Need to make money
Extend or bring your offline business online
Start an online business venture from your home or small office
Want to quit your day job

There are many more ways SBI! can help you. The above are just a few examples. The power of Site Build It! lies in its ability to make your website successful too. Provided you follow the system, of course.

How is SBI different?

Be glad we are not in a commercial for a certain ketchup that shall go unnamed. Otherwise I would have answered that with, “It’s different!” After a few times, you would have gone nuts.

Anyway, Site Build It! is the only package that guarantees success. And not just tall claims, but solid proof. See below.

Site Build It! is the only package that includes everything you need to succeed — tools to build your website, market your website, build new as well as ongoing traffic, etc. etc. etc. And they go on adding more and more at no extra charge.

Site Build It! is the only package that removes all the technological barriers and reduces the work and time required by 90%. But mind you, you still have to work hard. This is not one of those get-rich-quick-by-magic type schemes. You are going to build a real business, and building a real business always takes work.

Bottom line? Success.

How do you know?

I know because I am a happy customer too. I have an SBI! site of my own.

I know because they give proof of success (link opens in a new window).

They deliver verifiable results (link opens in a new window). Those are a few hundreds of their clients who have websites in the top 1%. Of course, that page doesn’t include all their successful clients, only a small cross-section of them.

35% of SBI! sites ranked in the top 1% of all sites on the web
53% were in the top 2%
62% scored in the top 3%

I know some of these people with these websites. These people are real, like you and me. I get a chance to interact with some of these people.

If you want to know more, maybe you would like to go to the Site Build It! summary site (link opens in a new window). Or you can even ask a real SBI! owner (link opens in a new window) yourself.

Bluehost – Consumer complaints and comments, facts, and company profile

Hostorian — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:28:41 +0000

Summary

Bluehost is one of our recommended web hosts. They have been around since 1996, and currently host over 750,000 web sites. They provide professional web hosting plans that include all the features one can possibly want, and at the best possible price. From top-notch support (I personally have seen answers to my support requests within minutes) to great service and features, there is everything to like about Bluehost, and nothing to dislike, from my personal experience.

Why I’m so impressed with them: Among other things (read below for more), I once sent an email to their CEO Matt Heaten, just to see what happens. I got back a personal reply from him! Now look. It’s not like Bluehost is a company running out of someone’s basement or anything. They host 750,000+ websites with them! So the CEO replying back to an unknown person is a BIG DEAL, as far as I am concerned. It shows how much he cares about his customers. This is reflected in everything that the company does. They keep improving their technology, their packages, their support system, and everything else.

Website: Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Quick Facts

Number of domains hosted: Over 750,000
Services: Shared hosting (at $6.95/month) with free set-up, no hidden fees, domain included, unlimited disk space, unlimited domains and sub-domains, unlimited data transfer, and support for almost every script you can imagine
Location: Provo, UT (USA)
Guarantees: 30-day money back guarantee, highest uptime, no hidden fees, free domain for life
Contact information: Call (888) 401-HOST, (888) 401-4678, or visit their contact page.

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Products & Services

Shared Linux hosting (at $6.95/month) with free set-up, no hidden fees, domain included, unlimited disk space, unlimited domains and sub-domains, unlimited data transfer, and support for almost every script you can imagine.

Hostorian’s Review

Performance

While Bluehost does tend to oversell like every other web hosting company out there, they have tried really hard to not let that affect the overall performance of the servers. Judging from the feedback by other people who host their sites with Bluehost, and other reviews (and my own personal experience), they’ve just got to be one of the better performing hosts in the shared web hosting space.

With the rapid growth that Bluehost has been experiencing in the recent past, they have constantly been upgrading their bandwidth as well as servers and data centers to keep up with the increasing demand.

Overall, they seem very reliable for hosting serious websites.

Features

The number of features offered by Bluehost just boggles the mind – unlimited storage, unlimited domains and sub-domains, unlimited data transfer, drag and drop site-builder, support for 100 databases, e-commerce support, several plug-in scripts and shopping carts, blogs, forums, wiki, multi-media support, and so many other things, it just boggles the mind.

They offer almost everything you would want from a Linux web hosting service – cPanel (the best hosting control panel), fantastico support, .htaccess customization, custom php.ini files, and more. They even allow shell access (SSH), and have DDOS protection and power backup and complimentary site backup services.

Support and Customer Care

Here again I can speak from personal experience. Their support is unlike ANYTHING I have ever seen. They are the best!

I have received answers to my questions within minutes of sending emails to their support no matter what the time was. And the biggest surprise (!) was that the support person used to actually read my email and give me exactly the answer I needed!

They even helped me with a problem I had with a PHP script I had installed on one of my websites.

Not surprisingly, they have won several awards for customer support. And why not, when they take such good care of their customers.

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Actual Customer Feedback

Used bluehost for 2 years now. Always up, good customer service, and good value. - g torregrassa

They are definitely WELL worth the $6.95 per month and even more! I’ve been very impressed with their service, speed and features. The uptime could be a bit better, but I’m guessing it’s about 98%. Just a few unannounced outages over the year. Overall, I couldn’t be more stoked about a Web host. I run 30k unique users and about 20gb of monthly bandwidth no problems! - Jason Mitchell

I’ve been with Blue Host for one year now. They are the BEST! Best overall and best value. Outstanding customer service. The company is always making improvements AND they are HONEST. A novice might find it a little challenging to figure everything at first, but once you do the number of features is unbeatable. - Brad

Bluehost is amazing. Their service is really amazingly outstanding. They go well beyond what is required and are always eager to help. - Amit

I have been with Bluehost for over 5 years and as a web designer, appreciate a good host. I recommend Bluehost to all my website clients. I have worked with many different hosts and have not found one yet that I liked more than Bluehost. - Chantal

I have been with bluehost for over a year, and have not had a single hick up, i am running 3 domains. Whenever i have needed help their support has been able to promptly help me. - Isaac Witton, Australia

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Verdict Of This Review

Bluehost beats almost every other web host in the Linux shared hosting space. Unbeatable pricing, unmatched features, what more could one want?

Highly recommended!

Rating: 5 out of 5

Click here to go to the official Bluehost website

Apollo Hosting – Consumer complaints and comments, facts, and company profile

Hostorian — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:19:12 +0000

Summary

Apollo Hosting hosts over 165,000 domains since 1999. They provide reliable and affordable website hosting services for business, ecommerce, reseller and personal use with all the tools you need for a successful website.

Website: Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Quick Facts

Number of domains hosted: 165,000
Services: Business hosting (starting at $6.96/month), Personal hosting (starting at $6.96/month), Windows hosting (starting at $13.96/month), and Dedicated hosting (starting at $99.95/month)
Location: Austin, Texas (USA)
Guarantees: 30-day money back guarantee, 99.9% uptime guarantee, price freeze guarantee (for dedicated server hosting)
Contact information: Call 1-877-525-HOST (4678), or visit their contact page.

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Products & Services

Business Hosting: Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, Shared web hosting – Linux, Shared web hosting – Windows, Dedicated hosting – Linux, Dedicated hosting – Windows, Reseller hosting

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Hostorian’s Review

Performance

Several customers of Apollo Hosting have posted their reviews of their service. Most of them have reported negatively about their performance, uptime, etc. People report that their servers are frequently down, and at least one person has reported their site being down for a whole day. Another person reported their site being down at least once every week.

I wonder how many people take advantage of their 99.99% uptime guarantee, and if they don’t, why not.

Site speeds are also reported to be on the slow side. All in all Apollo Hosting does not score high on performance.

Features

Apollo Hosting offers a wide variety of features to cater to every need, budget and technical requirement. If you want any additional features not included in one of their core packages, you can always pay a bit extra to get them. This lets you totally customize the feature set if you want.

However, other web hosting companies offer more disk storage, more bandwidth/data transfer, and more domains on a single account.

Support and Customer Care

Their technical support is based out of their headquarters in Austin, Texas, and is completely in-house. This means no more struggling with foreign accents or trying to get your point across to someone with English as a second language.

In addition to this, Apollo Hosting provides a lot of options to help you with your support issues. There is a pre-sales FAQ, a collection of quick start guides, knowledgebase articles, video tutorials, online manuals, forums, help desk, live chat, and phone support to assist you in every way they can.

Their contact number and a live chat button are available from every page on their site, making it easy to get in touch with them, should you have any issues.

All that said, it is really difficult to get a meaningful response from them, especially if you run into a challenging technical problem. The live chat support personnel will usually ask you to get a support ticket, which makes you wonder why they are there in the first place.

The fact that their telephone support is not outsourced is both an advantage and disadvantage in that though you are spared the trauma of struggling through foreign accents of non-native speakers, they can only afford to employ a limited number of support people, causing long wait periods for telephone support.

On the bright side, their manuals, tutorials, and articles are really good, and if you are not afraid of getting your hands dirty managing your sites yourself, Apollo Hosting can be a very good choice for you.

Cons

A lot of features are offered at an extra price, and are not included in the package price. These prices are all clearly mentioned though, both on the package details page and the plan comparisons pages, so you will have a clear idea of what you would be paying before you purchase their services. Also, extra cost usually means they will spend additional resources to make sure everything runs smoothly, which is ultimately more important for a business than a few dollars per month. In addition, this pricing scheme means that those who don’t need the extra feature can pay less.
Their prices are slightly higher than other hosting companies. But this also means better hardware, better network and server performance, and better support, so it’s all worth it, if you think about it.
Customer support is not as good as some of the other hosting firms.

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Actual Customer Feedback

The Live Chat Tech Support is awesome and the low cost and great service is why I have been their customer for over 2 years. Apollo’s web hosting needs little web knowledge for upkeep. If I can maintain a website, anyone can! Thanks Apollo! – Dawna Avery, visualtestaments.com

I eventually tried 3 other providers before stumbling on Apollo. Email is extremely important in my business as our employees are all over the world and being up and running all the time is critical. I can not say enough good things about Apollo. They are always on call and always ready to help. Their network is one of the best. What they are doing is right on track. With a very in depth understanding of the industry and what is critical, I can truthfully say, they are doing a fantastic job. Customer service is one of the most critical areas for a company, and they know what they are doing. My business’ success depends on the website and email, and I feel that I am in good hands with Apollo. – Chris Atkins, linguasmex.com

I had previously been jumping from one hosting company to another, in search of the perfect host. I have now had my two websites with Apollohosting for about 2 years, and I am perfectly happy with their services – the main reason for choosing Apollohosting was that they have [a premium email filter] which blocks 99.9% of all spam and virus suspect emails on their server, and I don’t have to deal with them. Considering that I get around 700 spam messages per email address a day, this is a big load off my back, and my computer! But I also must say that the fact that I have not noticed any downtime of my websites at all, and they run smoothly, is also very valuable. When initially setting up my accounts, the help staff were always very helpful and kind, and since then I have not had to contact them once. I am here to stay! – Mimi Sidwell, jxranch.com

I am a long time Apollo Customer, Apollo Reseller, web developer and entrepreneur.

Apollo Hosting is there when you need them, late night, early morning, holidays, whenever. Apollo is there and that is nice and that’s why I’m still using them after 6 years. – Jeff Miller, closingvideos.com

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Verdict of This Review

Apollo Hosting does seem to be offering a wide array of services to cater to every need and budget, but it would have been better if they could focus on improving their pricing model, customer support, and performance of their servers in terms of speed and reliability.

Not recommended, unless maybe you are in Austin, Texas, and are looking for a local hosting provider.

Rating:

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

1&1 Internet UK – Consumer complaints and comments, facts, and company profile

Hostorian — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:32:50 +0000

Summary

1&1 claim to be the world’s number 1 web host and the fastest growing web hosting company. According to their “About 1&1″ page, 1&1′s global community is 7.46 million people strong with 2,500 new customers signing up every day.

Website: Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet UK website

Quick Facts

Number of domains: 9.82 million registered domains, and over 2.7 million websites
Services: Domain registration, Email hosting, Linux hosting, Microsoft hosting, VPS hosting, Managed Server hosting, Root Server hosting, Windows Server hosting, “eShop hosting,” Microsoft Sharepoint hosting
Location: 1&1 Internet Limited, Aquasulis House, 10-14 Bath Road, Slough, SL1 3SA, UK
Guarantees: 60-day money back guarantee, 99.99% uptime, no hidden charges
Contact information: Call 0871 641 21 21. Or visit the contact page on their website.

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet UK website

Products & Services

Domain registration, Email hosting, Linux hosting, Microsoft hosting, VPS hosting, Managed Server hosting, Root Server hosting, Windows Server hosting, “eShop hosting,” Microsoft Sharepoint hosting

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet UK website

Hostorian’s Review

Performance

Several customers of 1&1 Internet Ltd. UK have posted their reviews of their performance. Most, if not all, have a negative review of their performance.

From horror stories of how their servers seem to be down intermittently to how everything is slower than a drugged tortoise on occasions, the impression we get is not good.

Of course, some people report good things too, but it does shake your confidence in them overall.

Features

This is probably the only good thing about 1&1 Internet Ltd. UK and their web hosting packages. They are loaded with features.

But then so is every other hosting provider. In fact, most hosting providers let you host more domains in a single account.

They offer about £400 worth of software for free with their web hosting packages, and you can also get RatePoint for free with select business packages. You get 100 business cards for free when you sign up for their 1&1 Home package.

Support and Customer Care

Support and customer care seems to be a joke, in the words of many of their customers (who are now ex-customers and very happy about it). Some people switched hosting providers solely because of 1&1 Internet UK’s poor customer support.

In fact, they put you on hold for such long periods that it might be worth getting a speaker-phone just so you can continue doing other work while you are waiting for someone to answer the phone.

Not just that, it’s a battle to get them to understand the problem, and an even bigger battle to get them to solve it in a timely manner.

Cons

Canceling your account with them is very difficult, and requires you to fax a signed copy of your application to them.
Support is outsourced to a non-English speaking country, and not only is the accent difficult to understand, the support staff doesn’t seem to be competent either.
Because of their low prices, they are forced to share the same server among a lot of sites, and as a result the site performance is not up to the mark. Speeds are slow, and uptime is not good either.

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet UK website

Actual Customer Feedback

Awful, awful, awful service. Avoid these people like the plaque. I have customers who have registered domain names with one and one and releasing them to (better) other suppliers is a nightmare with .coms. The helpline is some far off country and the operators are difficult to understand especially when you require technical assistance.

Consequently my customers 1and1 domain and email account has NOT been running for 2 weeks. – Paul

Have now 6 domains with 1and1 uk and am very happy with the customer service and uptime, cant fault them yet – James Brabyn

I have bought an eshop from them and all I have to say is their online based program is so slow and you can not use any other things, they say you have 500mb but they don’t let you upload any thing to your space by any ftp or program other than their eshop which means you can only upload certain image files and that it.

Their customer service were alright in the begining but now no answer what so ever for a month or non at all for some of my posts.

I have to mention if you really want to go into truble then they are good at it. – Parkook

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet UK website

Verdict of This Review

Everything about 1&1 Internet Ltd. UK hosting is bad. May be a bit useful for registering cheap domains, but not good for hosting sites. Not recommended at all. Avoid at all costs.

Rating:

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet UK website

1&1 Internet Inc. – Consumer complaints and comments, facts, and company profile

Hostorian — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:22:10 +0000

Summary

Website: Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Quick Facts

Number of domains: 9.82 million registered domains, and over 2.7 million websites
Services: Domain registration, Email hosting, Linux hosting, Microsoft hosting, VPS hosting, Managed Server hosting, Root Server hosting, Windows Server hosting, “eShop hosting,” Microsoft Sharepoint hosting
Location: Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania, USA
Guarantees: 60-day money back guarantee, 99.99% uptime, no hidden charges
Contact information: Call 1-877-GO-1AND1 (1-877-461-2631). Or visit the contact page on their website.

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Products & Services

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Hostorian’s Review

Performance

1&1 Internet’s performance, according to customer reports found all over the web, is not too impressive. Several people report long downtimes, some even up to five days!

While they do have impressive hardware and connectivity, they host SO many websites, it’s apparently taking a toll on performance.

Well, that might be the reason, or it could be something else, but a prospective customer would be better advised to look for another web host with better performance records.

Features

They do offer an impressive array of features, but then, so do most web hosts these days.

Oh wait! Actually, there are quite a few web hosts that offer MORE features than 1&1 Internet does. For example, these days, several web hosts offer unlimited domains on a single shared hosting account. But the marketing angels at 1&1 only offer from 1-5 domains on a single shared hosting account, depending on your account type.

With the exception of a couple of features, most features can be classified as either something that everyone offers, or something that no one needs. Methinks someone at 1&1 Internet Inc is just trying to bloat the feature list.

We don’t want features we don’t need. We want more value, better hosting, better performance, and better service.

Support and Customer Care

One word: Crooks!

Several people complain about 1&1 Internet Inc. continuing to charge their credit cards long after they cancel their accounts with them. Getting a refund may not be impossible, but it’s close. Be prepared to file a complaint with your credit card company AND change your credit card if you want to avoid getting rebilled.

I have also read accounts of 1&1 Internet Inc’s customer service people yelling at customers, calling them names, and hanging up on them.

In case a customer’s credit card fails to authorize for some reason, they send it to a collection agency before even contacting the customer to remedy the situation. This is very strange, considering it would be a lot cheaper and quicker for them to just inform the customer that there is a problem, and ask them to update their billing information. Not to mention the PR suicide they are committing.

Cons

Horrible customer service and rude customer service people.
A big portion of the customer support is outsourced to a non-English speaking country, which makes understanding them difficult.
Performance is very bad, and customers frequently experience downtime, despite their 99.99% uptime guarantee.

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Actual Customer Feedback

If you are thinking of purchasing from 1&1 don’t do it! – Louis Lang

Filed complaint with Better Business Bureau. They already have and Unsatisfactory rating there. – Owner ( customerservice at clean-fill-wanted(dot)com )

My site has been down for 3 days with no support from 1and1 at all. Nobody will tell me what is going on. This company should be avoided at all costs. My site was intermittently down for 2 weeks prior to that. Please Please someone start a class action lawsuit. Google 1and1 and see millions of negative messages regarding 1and1. – Steve Tarnowski

1 and 1 is horrendous in every way! After transferring a domain to them and receiving confirmation from them that the transaction was completed, they sold the name to someone else without letting us know. They continued to bill us of course, and didn’t even give the promised and advertised promotional discount. This national campaign for the site lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they have still not corrected their mistake. The Better Business Bureau and Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office are investigating them, and so is the media. As an investigative journalist myself, I have been sharing my story with the print and broadcast community and my colleagues who are realizing how poorly this company conducts business. Hundreds of emails gone unanswered, phone calls dropped with no resolution, no support at all, and ethical issues are just the tip of the 1 and 1 iceburg. Caveat emptor! – Kelly

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website

Verdict of This Review

Not impressive at all. Stay away from this company at all costs. In fact, if you don’t like someone, send them over to 1&1 for hosting their websites. Not recommended, if you are thinking of hosting your own sites with them.

Rating:

Click here to go to the official 1&1 Internet Inc. website