Hostgator Review

Hostgator was founded in 2002, and is one of the ten largest hosting companies in the world.  Their data center is located in Houston, TX.  They currently serve more than 200,000 customers.  And they offer excellent redundancy and security.

This is a very reliable webhost with great response times.  And they rarely experience any downtime (99% uptime guarantee).  They offer a simple cpanel interface, and Fantastico Deluxe for easily installing Wordpress.  You’ll find all the bells and whistles you might eventually need, including script interfaces for Perl, CGI, Ruby on Rails, and Front Page.

This web hosting provider seems to be the most commonly used, and all the extra service providers out there will interface with Hostgator easily.  Don’t worry about that right now.  But later on, you may wish to automate some of your marketing tasks through third parties.

Customer service record is great.  Simple monthly billing, with no long term contract.  Plus a 45 day money back guarantee, just in case you’re not satisfied.  If you’re coming from another hosting provider, they will transfer your site to Hostgator for you at no extra charge.  They even give you a free credit for Google Adwords advertising.

Feedback from customers has generally been very good, and this is the Number 1 choice that I recommend, despite the fact that they do not give you a free domain name.  You can get one at www.namecheap.com for about $10. Go with Hostgator. You won’t regret it.

For Just One or Two Websites

If you’d like to start out small, go for the Hostgator Baby Plan.  It’s slightly more flexible than their one-website Hatchling plan (their cheapest, at $5 per month).  And sooner or later, you’re bound to have more than one website.

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The Official Business Plan

The Hostgator Business Plan is similar to all their other plans — but they throw in a couple of freebies that could be useful.  So you might consider this option, as long as you’re only putting up one main business site (subdomains under your main domain are still okay).

The first freebie is an SSL certificate for your business.  The other is a free, national (U.S.), toll free number.  While that sounds like a great perk, the toll free number actually just comes from an internet based forwarding service.  And only the first 100 minutes per month are completely free.  That’s not a lot of calls!

If you’re debating between this plan and the Reseller Plan (below), I would choose the latter.  With Reseller, you can have separate CPanels and separate tracking statistics on every one of your websites.  That can be invaluable!  And there are other ways to easily get a toll free number and SSL certificate.

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For All the Websites You Might Create

If you plan to be a serious online marketer with many websites, then your best choice will be the Hostgator Reseller package for $24.95 per month.  You get 24 gigabytes of storage space, and it’s easy to upgrade to a bigger hosting package down the road.

You can have a separate cpanel for every one of your domains.  You can even sell hosting space from your account to others, and let your customer manage his own cpanel.  Hostgator even provides a free guidebook which explains how to start selling hosting space.

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InMotion Review

InMotion Hosting was founded in 2001, and is headquartered in Los Angeles.  It has two high performance data centers, with good security and redundancy in case of power failures.  Their website seems very business oriented, which is great.  The company claims they can provide the fastest internet data speeds, up to 6 times faster, because they have data centers on both the east and west coasts.

They seem to have great customer feedback, and might be worth considering, as long as you will not be needing a lot of domains on your hosting account.  You can have 1 active domain on their personal accounts.  If you pay $18.95 per month for their top business account, you are allowed 16 domains (and unlimited subdomains).

A personal account costs $3-$5 per month.  Business accounts are $7, $9, or $19 per month.  They have plenty of support for scripts, and offer several shopping cart choices — plus the Google Checkout shopping cart on their business accounts only.

They appear to be a pretty modern company, and have a good reputation for excellent customer service.  They offer the standard scripts, cpanel, and 2 different site builders.  So InMotion is well worth considering. But if you think you might have a need for more than 16 domains, you’ll be better off with Hostgator.

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Bluehost Review

Bluehost was founded in 1996, and is based in Orem, Utah.  They offer pretty good speed and throughput, and they have a “fair” reputation for reliability and decent customer service. But is “fair” really good enough?  I’m not so sure.  Reliability and uptime are paramount these days.

If you look over their website, Bluehost seems to offer just as much as the more popular players in the web hosting game — various script languages, the latest version of cPanel, autoresponder, website builder or wordpress, etc.  And they are obviously striving hard to compete.  Right now they’re offering a free domain name for life (worth about $10/yr.), and prominently featuring a live chat box so you can easily ask questions about their service before you become a client.

Some people seem to feel they are offering a very good deal, and say their service has gotten better over the past year.  But, as of February and March 2010, some people are still complaining about a lack of service with Bluehost.  They are citing technical problems, sudden downtime, a failure to back up servers, and unreasonable account restrictions.

Bluehost charges a $30 account setup fee, and you must pay for at least 3 months of hosting in advance.  They do have a pretty good track record and reputation over the years.  But it seems like they need to focus more on the quality of their service in order to become more competitive.

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Fat Cow Review

Fat Cow has been around for awhile, since 1998.  They use two modern data centers in the Boston area, with 24/7 monitoring and redundant power in case a server goes down.  While their website seems a bit skimpy at first, they do have a good reputation, and seem to cater to people who are not too tech savvy yet.

They offer 24/7 phone support, the usual array of supported scripting languages, and optional shopping cart.  For people who want to start out slow, there’s a Mini Moo feature which enables one to create a super simple site just to introduce a business and the face behind it.  Their control panel is proprietary, and the shopping cart system is ShopSite.  They also include 2 gb of backup from Carbonite for your website, free for the first year.

Although they are one of the top providers in the U.S., they do seem to have more than their share of downtime complaints.  And, as a result, it seems like people either love them or hate them.  This is hard to understand, since they claim uptime of better than 99%.  Perhaps they just have more than their share of newbies, who manage to crash their own sites more often than most.

You will need to pay by the year with Fat Cow, and they only offer one type of account that includes everything you wish to use.

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iPage Review

The iPage company has been offering web hosting since 1998, and has six locations worldwide.  Their two data centers are in Boston.  They strike me as a medium sized company which mainly provides elementary web hosting services to newbies.  Unless your needs are extremely simple, I would choose one of the more popular vendors over this one.  But if you just want to keep the family scrapbook online, or make a personal page about your hobbies, you might be very happy with this service.

They do offer several types of shopping carts.  However, if you actually want to make money online, I would move on.  Although iPage offers a lot of extra services, not all of them are free.  They offer the vdeck panel instead of cpanel to manage your website, and a non standard website builder.

At first glance, they seem to be fairly reliable and security conscious, and they do offer redundancy in case one of their servers goes down.  They also give you the Carbonite backup service for your web site at no extra charge.  But they don’t say much about their throughput speed, which makes me think that your site could possibly run slow.

Their website has several broken links and other inconsistencies.  For example, it talks about checking how much bandwidth you have used so you don’t exceed your limit, which doesn’t make much sense if your bandwidth is unlimited.

I have dealt with other web host providers who used an amateur, non standard approach to building a website.  I cannot say that iPage would fall into that realm, but I would not take a chance on them, based on what I’m reading on their website.

Their pricing is quite low.  You would normally pay $5.50 per month for one of their websites.  And their promo is actually showing a $3.50 per month cost right now.

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