10.HostMonster

Summary

One-stop hosting plan, unlimited space and bandwidth, MySQL support, PHP5 and Perl5 as standard, wide choice of tools and software to install and a convenient hassle free control panel – that's what HostMonster comes with. Add 100% US-based support and $100 free credits on Google AdWords advertising, mix with the competitive price, shake and serve!

HostMonster specializes in customer satisfaction – you'll never get stuck with its services, whether you want to add a new domain, create a mailbox, or do something more complex. The company is located in Utah and claims that everything, including technical support personnel, resides there. With over one million websites hosted and 15+ years of experience, HostMonster looks monstrously promising.

The $4.95 per month price is a good deal, but the renewal price is $6.95, which is more or less average. The free domain name and site builder included with all new accounts let a newbie webmaster jump in quickly, and experienced clients will find custom cron jobs, raw access logs, and SSH available right from the beginning.

Secure SSL server and loads of eCommerce platforms make it easy to launch a new online store within a few hours. The Google credits and free search engine optimization services will come in handy as soon as you start promoting it.

Reliability

According to test results measured by Pingdom™, the overall uptime value was 99.50%* during the measurement period. Client's data is not backed up automatically, so you should either take care of this aspect of data security yourself or purchase the backup services offered for $12.95/month.

Speed characteristics are average for this class of web hosting. Pingdom™ benchmarking showed an average response time of 0,634* seconds, which is possibly due to the narrow 15 mbps connection.

Money Back Guarantee

Aside from the typical 30 day full money back guarantee HostMonster offers, there's also a "super full" money back guarantee that works for 3 calendar days after the purchase and includes a refund for dedicated IP and Postini anti-spam services. All other payments, including SSL certificates, Site Backup Pro, SEO Package, SiteLock, and domain privacy are non-refundable. You must also pay for your free domain if you want to keep it for yourself after cancellation.

Ease of Use

HostMonster implements an interesting approach to the control panel. In addition to the well-known hosting control panel application, cPanel, they offer a lite version of the "Command Center" control panel.

Command Center's menu is pared down to the most common tasks a web master may need: creating and managing e-mail boxes, adding domain names, assigning a design template to a site, and filling the site with content.

The link to cPanel is at the top of the page along with links to additional options: dedicated IP, Postini, DNS management, billing account management, and others.

The main control panel is more or less standard with the exception of links to third-party services, billing, and video tutorials. In addition to the free Weebly Site Builder available from the Command Center, HostMonster also offers an alternative: the Simple Scripts installation framework that allows the setup of several other web publishing solutions such as BasicPages or liveSite.

Not all of them are free, of course, but the real problem is that not all of them actually work. We had no problems using BasicPages, but Trendy Site Builder's trial failed to work, requesting the ionCube PHP loader library.

Offering multiple third-party software is a common marketing trick, but does it help if they simply don't install?

We also tried to install several other products including CMS, CRM, and blogs without any further problems.

Basically, HostMonster is not at all intimidating and provides every type of functionality a user needs including assisting novices with its smart and simple Command Center. Unfortunately, not all of the suggested third-party scripts worked as expected, which could indicate that the staff doesn't actually test all of them for compatibility.

Technical Support

HostMonster is equipped with multiple user communication channels but achieves only average response times. The responses were, however, precise and informative.

Other support channels are phone, community forum, and plenty of self-assistance materials. The personnel at HostMonster picked up the phone after 2 minutes – an average value again.

When you want to solve a problem yourself, you can enjoy dozens of video tutorials and an informative knowledge base containing answers to virtually anything, but when you need the help of a pro, you will probably have to wait on the queue.

Conclusion

It looks extremely cost effective at first glance, but HostMonster is a wolf in lamb's clothing. The default plan costs $4.95, but the company offers a Pro Package with free SSL, dedicated IP, daily backups, and higher CPU and bandwidth priority. With the Pro Package you probably won't notice longer hosting response times, the 200k file count limit, and 100 MySQL table cap. But it costs $19.95/month, not $4.95, and that's way over the top.

The number of third-party software offerings is impressive, but not all of them are actually compatible with the web host. The unhurried technical support is partially offset by the rich informational resources and the handy quick-start Command Center.

HostMonster is not ideal but is still a comfortable choice if you're looking for an easy-to-launch web hosting solution.

 

Read More

9.Omnis

Summary

Omnis was founded in early 2000 as both a web host service provider and domain name registrar. Being one of the older players on the market, the company is now beginning to use modern buzz words and calls its services "cloud web hosting". Specifically, this means that all resources offered to a customer including, but not limited to, CPU, bandwidth, disk storage, and MySQL connections are dynamically allocated among accounts according to demand.

Omnis provides both Linux and Windows cloud hosting starting at $5.95 and $7.95 per month respectively. Alas, there are no "first time client" discounts, nor can you order a host for longer than two years to lock in a low price.

Nonetheless, the list of default features provided is quite impressive and should cover the needs of virtually any small or medium sized business web site. The defaults are unmetered bandwidth and disk space, unlimited e-mail and database accounts, a free domain name, and many scripts ready to be installed. Dedicated IP and private SSL are paid options.

The company offers 24/7 technical support and claims that all support employees are native English speakers located in California.

Reliability

Like many other medium segment web hosts, Omnis guarantees 99.9% uptime of their servers. This promise is more than fulfilled. The Pingdom™ uptime monitoring service reported 100%* uptime during the measurement period. The servers are fast as well as reliable. Pingdom™ reports approximately 0,388* seconds as the average response time for the tested website.

UPDATE: On June 01, 2012 Omnis Network blocked Pingdom™'s access to its servers. Thus, we were able to check the uptime and average response time only for the period of May 15, 2012 through May 30, 2012. We rated Omnis's speed and reliability to be 3 out of 5 because 16 days of testing are not enough to draw any conclusions.

Unfortunately daily backups of client's data are not available. System backups are made, but with no guarantee that you can restore your very latest information from them. Even worse, a fee of $100 may be charged to you for any files you need from a system backup. That may be a small price to pay to save your entire website, but it is certainly not pleasant.

Money Back Guarantee

By default, Omnis provides a 30 day money back guarantee with no hidden catches. Of course, the refund is only available for new host accounts, and any additional fees will be deducted from the refund amount.

Ease of Use

Omnis utilizes its own custom control panel and mastering it takes only a few minutes. All options and setup parameters are well explained, though the design of the panel is a bit techie-oriented for our taste. However this definitely doesn't detract from its functionality. All standard functions work perfectly. For example, we tried to create two e-mail accounts and setup forwarding from the first one to the second one. All went as expected.

The home page promised $100 in Adwords credits and free access to SiteBuilder, and both appear at the bottom of the control panel along with a script installer and a Google site maps link. Aside from those items, this section also contains a link to website design services and an SEO offer providing various SEO tools like link building and rank tracking. As a bonus, useless search engine submission and meta tags optimization are also included.

The most interesting part is the script installer.

Blogs, CMSes, picture galleries and shopping carts are ready to install with a click. Interestingly, the Joomla CMS displays an incompatibility message which means the installation package for this script is outdated and doesn't match the host's PHP version.

To test the installer we tried to install WordPress and Serendipity blogs to our account.

Everything worked OK, except that you don't get your script installed immediately. It is queued and installed later, after which you are sent a confirmation e-mail. This was an insignificant problem, especially since the wait was only a minute or two, but it is an unusual procedure that requires additional effort for the user.

The free SiteBuilder provided by default allows easy development of websites with up to 3 pages using 450 design templates.

Along with the free basic package, Premium ($7.95) and eCommerce ($11.95) SiteBuilder packages are available with more templates, more pages and more capabilities, which is great as long as you want to sacrifice originality to easier and faster deployment.

In general, working with Omnis is seamless and easy. Its unusual account manager panel, which requires some time to get used to, is a minor defect. All functions work as promised, and we didn't experience any significant glitches during the test.

Technical Support

It is claimed that all technical support staff resides in California, so we were especially interested in finding out if that is somehow reflected in support quality.

Conclusion

Omnis is an old-fashioned web host, but, nevertheless, tries to keep up with modern trends. The cloud web hosting it provides offers competitive hosting capacity with a lot of bonus options, including a decent website editor and a nifty script installer. AdWords and Yahoo credits will come in handy if you are just starting your own business, while dedicated IP address and private SSL are a must if you're serious about it.

Reliability and the speed of the web host are excellent too. Powered by Tier1 fiber optic network connections and SSD drives, Omnis shows impressive response time. The 99.9% guaranteed and 100%* actually recorded uptime prove the high quality of this hosting provider.

At the same time, the web host seems overpriced compared with other players. Dedicated IP addresses and SSL, as well as the offered SEO and web design services, require additional payment. You still might want a lot more for your $5.95/month than all the scripts and functions Omnis provides. Even flash-like technical support cannot justify this price.

The hosting quality, on the other hand, is far superior to what you would expect for the price.

Read More

7.Bluehost

Summary

At first, BlueHost appears to be a very typical shared web hosting service. Indeed, for some reason, BlueHost doesn’t try to differentiate itself for position against the other web hosts. It offers a typical one-plan-fits-all solution with unlimited data transfer and disk space, MySQL databases, e-mail boxes, etc. at the typical rate of $3.95 per month.

Dig deeper and you find that BlueHost is located in Provo, Utah and is obviously owned and managed by the same team as HostMonster. No wonder the offers of these two web hosts are very similar. So are their pros and cons.

Featuring 24/7 U.S. based technical support, a rich choice of available scripts, and $100 of Google Adwords free credits, BlueHost is easy to start off with. More experienced customers will benefit from SSL server, a number of e-store applications, and a dedicated IP address, which, however, is a paid option. The promotional price of $3.95/month turns to a pumpkin on your next billing date, so be ready to pay $6.99/month for the next 3-year period.

Reliability

We measured the reliability of the web host using the Pingdom™ online service. Just like HostMonster, BlueHost doesn't give any kind of uptime guarantee. Pingdom™ reported 99.84%* uptime during the test period. We also estimated overall performance of the web host and the average response time was 0,492* seconds according to Pingdom™. The company doesn’t provide daily backups for free, but it does offer a Pro Package including backup services and other options.

Money Back Guarantee

BlueHost promises to return your money back at anytime if you don’t like the service. However, if you cancel your account after 30 days, the actual amount refunded is pro-rated, meaning you only get back money for the unused time. Canceling an account within the first 30 days refunds the entire sum less setup and domain name registration fees.

Ease of Use

The frontend control panel BlueHost offers gives the user rapid access to the most common functions and all standard commands of cPanel. What are the typical tasks any new client usually does? Link a domain, create an e-mail box, build up some design for the website, or setup a third-party blog or CMS. All of these are readily available from the management panel and that’s certainly convenient, especially for new comers.

All standard functions work without a hitch. Setting up e-mail forwarding or browsing files through the file manager is a no brainer.

Just like its monstrous cousin, BlueHost offers a number of free tools to help you deploy a new website quickly. These are eight site builders (Two of them are free trials, but the rest are free); and SimpleScripts installation framework that allows you to load any kind of third-party software to your brand new site with a few clicks. In addition you are entitled to receive $100 in Google AdWords credits and $50 in Facebook credits for free.

To evaluate the functionality of the software, we tried to install several applications using the SimpleScripts auto-installer.

When we installed WordPress, the auto-installer automatically suggested we add several plugins to make our WP-powered website sales-ready from the start. The installation completed twenty seconds later.

We didn’t face any significant hassles while managing or configuring BlueHost. However, just as with HostMonster some third-party solutions are apparently outdated and aren’t monitored by the web host personnel for updates. Trendy Site Builder’s 10-day trial always produced an error message. That is unfortunate because a free site builder is a promised feature and could be a determining factor in the decision to choose BlueHost.

Overall, the web host is quite easy to use. The control panel is straightforward, but the compatibility issues could mean that the staff doesn’t pay much attention to updates.

Technical Support

As a typical offering on the web hosting market, BlueHost provides a quite typical range of support options as well. Phone lines and live chat are for quick response, and the online ticket system should help resolve more complex situations. We submitted inquiries using every available channel and measured the response time in each case. The results were: a three minute wait to answer our phone call; a three minute wait for a live chat; and a six hour 36 minute wait for a response to our ticket. Wow!

If your problem is minor and you’re ready to solve it yourself with FAQs, the knowledge base, and video tutorials, you’re okay. But if you run into a serious problem, waiting for the support team to solve it, or even to answer your ticket, may require a whole nine yards of patience.

Conclusion

BlueHost provides more than you would expect for $3.95 per month and, honestly, more than it can manage. Tons of third-party software products look tasty but have minor issues. The sluggish support response is way beyond the bounds of decency, though you may never happen to need their assistance.

Overall, BlueHost is a strange mixture of excellent usability and technical problems. You won't make a big mistake if you select BlueHost, though. It is a reasonable choice for the price asked.

 

 

Read More

6.InMotion

Summary

InMotion Hosting comes with a range of web hosting solutions that starts with the budget $3 shared hosting package and runs up to dedicated servers for $199.95. Such versatility means the company targets multiple segments of the market: personal clients, businesses, corporate clients, and so on. While the cheapest options can barely satisfy a serious webmaster, the business web hosting plans offered by InMotion look serious.

Business plans include three price options: $5.95/month, $7.95/month and $13.95/month. With the basic business plan you receive unlimited data transfer, unlimited disk space, 1000 FTP accounts, 25 subdomains, a maximum of six parked domains, free daily backups, and a set of scripts to install for free. More expensive plans also include shopping cart software, more domains, MySQL databases, and FTP accounts. Additionally, all accounts get a free domain name for one year and free advertising credits at Google and Yahoo/Bing.

The web host has been based in Los Angeles since 2001, but its servers are spread across the US. Power Dell servers, constant 24/7/365 monitoring and daily backups should guarantee the highest level of reliability: 99.9%.

InMotion claims to be eco-friendly by partnering with Trees For The Future, a non-profit organization dedicated to sustainable agroforestry. The company also tries to reduce consumption of electric energy by only using air conditioning in the data centers when it is necessary.

Reliability

The web host offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee for business plans. The Pingdom™ web host reliability service reported 99.47%* uptime for its servers. The average response time according to Pingdom™ was 0,544* seconds.

Money Back Guarantee

Depending on the plan you select, InMotion offers two types of money back guarantee: 30 or 90 days. Simply, a client purchasing a business class hosting plan for a longer period is eligible for a 90 day money back guarantee, otherwise it is 30 days. Domain name registration fee and setup fees are non-refundable. You can only request cancellation electronically. For some reason, phone calls and e-mail are not processed for cancellation requests.

Everything looks typical in InMotion's money back guarantee, except for a single remark. Customers requesting cancellation who have used more than 500MB of bandwidth, will be charged for that excess.

Ease of Use

Thanks to cPanel 11, every aspect of InMotion, from e-mail boxes and FTP accounts to MySQL databases and subdomains, is easy to configure. Conveniently, the panel has links to the billing form and to technical support. The "Advanced" section allows an experienced user to setup .htaccess handlers or configure cron jobs, while the "Software and services" section makes the process of setting up a new website as easy as pie (at least in theory). The Fantastico auto installer contains dozens of scripts, and you can start accepting credit card and PayPal payments within a minute by creating an account at PayPal and e-OnlineData directly from your account management panel. These are, of course, paid options.

The free premium site builder promised for all business accounts is not available in the control panel by default. You have to request it through your account management panel. The process is far less intuitive than it should be. Also, during the test, installation of the website builder failed for some reason.

Additional installation attempts also failed because the host reported that we already had a site builder on our account. Oh, did we mention you can only have one?

Then, after the builder finally appeared to work, the link to it was located in the "Account & Billing" section (why?), and it successfully… didn't accept the login data. We tried to reset the password but that didn't work either.

Finally, we asked support to reset the password and after that we, at last, were able to login to our hard earned Premium Web Builder.

As for Fantastico, it turned out to be less problematic. Fantastico provides 30+ scripts and software for automatic installation. WordPress and Drupal CMS installed swiftly and smoothly with no effort on our part.

Either the CMS version was outdated, or the hosting plan didn't have all features required to run the script.

The operation of InMotion's third-party tools and options isn't the best. Many functions don't work, or they have issues requiring technical support. Alas, we can't call this approach easy. Standard functionality, however, works fine.

Technical Support

We investigated the quality and responsiveness of technical support through the three main channels InMotion provides: telephone, e-mail, and live chat. The wait times were minor: three minutes for e-mail, and one minute for live chat. The average wait for a phone call was three minutes, which is a bit long.

As previously mentioned, the site builder didn't load when we set up and began working with our account. When we asked support for assistance, the problem was solved in 10-12 minutes total, including the time we spent describing the problem.

In general, the support team seems professional and polite. All questions were answered promptly and really helped to solve the issues raised.

In addition to the phone, e-mail and live chat support, you can also read FAQs, access online tutorials, or ask for help through the community forums.

Conclusion

InMotion's versatility is a bit of a low-down trick. While appearing to provide a range of hosting plans suitable for almost any target audience, InMotion doesn't really manage to provide an adequate level of service for all of them. Cheap personal plans starting at $3.00/month are simply too basic to be used for a serious website. With 1Gb bandwidth, no MySQL databases, no IMAP, and a single FTP account there are much better ways to spend your three bucks.

Business plans with the minimum fee of $5.95 per month are much more attractive, though you may still feel the lack of features at times. The Launch package, with only two MySQL databases, may force you to choose between a forum and a blog, and the zero eCommerce solutions offered by default leave little space for anything other than a tiny handmade e-store.

Although many third-party options had technical problems at the time of the review, the staff was extremely helpful and courteous at all times. Quick response and rapid problem resolution is a great advantage of InMotion Hosting. Free daily backups, even with basic plans also add to InMotion's overall rank.

With its 90 day money back guarantee you lose nothing, so why not give this web host a chance?

 

 

 

Read More

5.JaguarPC

Summary

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but that doesn't seem to be true for JaguarPC. Starting with only two servers way back in 1998, it managed to achieve a 95% annual growth rate in 2012. With thousands of powerful Cisco servers in Houston, Atlanta, New Jersey and even in the UK, JaguarPC is brave enough to guarantee 100% uptime no matter what's happening in the world.

This web host provides shared hosting services as well as both virtual and dedicated servers. Shared web hosting starts at $4.95/month, and, importantly, the renewal price is the same. With hundreds of free scripts to install, free daily backups, free SSL, 24/7 technical support, a site builder and "unlimited everything", JaguarPC seems to be one of the most attractive options on the market. And if you don't like it, you can cancel your account within the first 30 days and get full unconditional money back.

Reliability

The declared 100% uptime guarantee is not empty words – JaguarPC manages the security of its servers very well with super-reliable Cisco and HP networks, dual-redundant power feeds, 10-foot security fences, 12 inch concrete floors and 12,000 gallons of reserve diesel fuel. No matter what is happening in the world, your website will remain firm as a rock.

The actual measurement conducted with the help of the Pingdom™ service showed 99.98%* uptime. This is higher than what many web hosts offer, but it isn't 100%. We aren't seeking a quarrel, but if a company promises 100% uptime and even promises to issue a refund (!) in case of default, one would definitely expect 100%, not less.

According to Pingdom™, the actual response time is 0,322* seconds.

Money Back Guarantee

Like many of its competitors, JaguarPC offers a 30-day unconditional money back guarantee for new clients. The refund doesn't include service fees or the domain name registration fee. If you cancel your account after 30 days you don't get back anything unless you cancel prior to the next billing date.

Ease of Use

We didn't experience problems while setting up the account, but issues were evident during operation. The control panel JaguarPC uses is the popular cPanel. This solution allows tuning up everything you have to with a minimum of clicks, so no surprises here. Unfortunately, the layout of non-typical elements was not brilliant. There are, for instance, no quick-links to billing or to online support, so you have to open the home page and login from there unless you are really observant can find the "Submit request" link in the "Advanced" section that simply sends you to the client's area.

But the worst thing happened when we tested the functionality of the web host control panel. While all standard functions seemed to work perfectly, that is sub-domains and parked domains, e-mail boxes, web log analyzers, and MySQL functioned well, some third party solutions did not open at all! They simply returned a 404 "Requested page not found" error. For example, among two script auto-installers offered by JaguarPC, only Fantastico worked from the start. The other one, Softaculous, produced 404.

Many other links in the control panel worked (or should we say ‘malfunctioned') the same way, including all SEO tools and RVSiteBuilder. Either this was our bad luck, or JaguarPC was having some issues, but this isn't what you would hope for after logging into your brand new hosting account.

We created a support ticket describing the problem and it was soon fixed. After that, Softaculous and other third-party products began to work ok. The huge advantage of the Softaculous installer is its list, sorted by rating and popularity, of hundreds of software applications and scripts you can install. This isn't an achievement of Jaguar, of course, but they do provide this tool and it is utterly handy. Once it works, that is.

We also tried to install several popular scripts to our test account using the Fantastico script installer and WordPress and osCommerce online merchant platform installed effortlessly.

JaguarPC is generally easy to use but may require additional education for third-party scripts and software proposals.

Technical Support

JaguarPC web host offers technical support using several channels: e-mail, telephone, online-tickets, and live chat. When we review web hosts, we usually ask technical support more or less the same questions, how to do this, how much of that can I have, and so on. But with JaguarPC, our standard check of support efficiency and effectiveness was supplemented with a real problem that confronted us.

The issue was the 404 error shown when we clicked third-party options in the control panel. The online ticket we created to solve this issue was answered after 80+ minutes and only after we also reported the problem via live chat. The live chat response was prompt though.

The level of the technical support was higher with our standard questions. We received phone and live chat answers in 1 minute or less, and our online ticket with a typical "how to" question was answered after 22 minutes.

With both the real and the imaginary problems the support technicians were polite and straightforward. All problems were eventually solved.

Conclusion

JaguarPC is definitely better than you might think after reading this review. Not only does it offer an impressive 100% uptime guarantee (no other web hosts in this rating do), it offers decent shared web hosting services for a competitive price with no surprises at renewal time. While not being an absolutely cost effective choice due to the lack of Google advertising credits or free domain names it is still worth considering thanks to the fair price and the clear renewal policy.

The responsive technical support does what it has to, yet you may have to face serious time-lags, especially if your problem is beyond FAQ.

Also, JaguarPC is literally stuffed with delicious scripts and software offered for free, plus it provides free daily backups and a free SSL server. Nonetheless, some software products obviously didn't work and required our effort and the involvement of support to fix them.

For as low as $4.95/month you will get a host as reliable as Fort Knox, a handful of applications, and, possibly, issues you will have to resolve with the diligent but turtle-fast technical support.

 

Read More