4.Web Hosting Hub

Summary

Web Hosting Hub seems to be a relatively recent comer to the hosting service industry. The site's "About" page asserts that the company was founded in 2001, but the lack of activity prior to 2010, when the domain name was repurchased, argues against this statement. In any case, its slogan, "The Easiest Way to Get Online", along with the features to make it come true, make Web Hosting Hub a serious threat to the competition.

With headquarters in Virginia and servers in New York, California and Florida, the provider offers quality shared hosting services with a "one size fits all" plan stuffed with fresh juicy features at an even tastier price. The basic offer is $4.95/month for a 3-year package.

For that price you'll receive unlimited bandwidth and disk space, unlimited domain names, e-mail and MySQL accounts, an impressive list of installable scripts and software plus Google and Yahoo ad credits for the total sum of $150. You can also register a free domain name which will cost $11.95 to renew after the first year.

Obviously oriented towards beginner website owners, Web Hosting Hub also offers a convenient option for migrating an existing website with no downtime at all. This is done by providing an account with a temporary URL, so you can painlessly move your data to Web Hosting Hub and then change the domain name only after the data transfer is complete.

Reliability

Web Hosting Hub makes no uptime guarantee, but it demonstrates impressive performance according to the Pingdom™ monitoring service. Within the period of measurement the host was up 99.95%* of the time with an average response time of about 0,290* seconds. Its servers are fast and stable. Continuous monitoring and daily backups protect you if something goes wrong. Backups are a paid option, though, so make sure you have selected it during the account setup if you don't want to bother with backups yourself.

Money Back Guarantee

Its outstanding 90-day money back guarantee for new hosting registrations makes Web Hosting Hub looks very interesting if you are considering going online. Of course, this doesn't cover domain name registration fees, SSL certificate fees, or other non-hosting related payments. If you accepted the "Free Domain Name" promotion, the domain name cost is also deducted.

Ease of Use

With the latest cPanel under the cowling, Web Hosting Hub provides effortless access to all of the typical functions a user may need: e-mail accounts, domain name parking, server log analyzers, and MySQL manipulation are all instantly available from the control panel. The top band of the panel contains a list of paid services Web Hosting Hub promotes including online backup service, virtual phone number service, and credit card processor.

We have tested the standard functions and haven't encountered any problems with the panel. Everything works as it should. Importantly, the web host provides access to some pro features a tech-savvy user may need, such as raw logs, .htaccess overrides, and phpMyAdmin.

Under the misleading label "Install WordPress" hides Fantastico, a popular autoinstall script for quick installation. Fantastico quickly installs various products including the aforementioned WordPress and other blogs, dozens of CMSes including Drupal, Mambo, Joomla and TYPO3, help desks, eCommerce platforms, mailing lists, wiki, galleries and lots of other stuff.

We noticed a discrepancy in its free promotions: a banner in cPanel reminded us to use our free $75 in credit for AdWords advertising, but the account management panel says it's $100.

Web Hosting Hub provides a premium website builder featuring 500+ templates and drag-n-drop site editing. The link to request the site builder is a bit obscure: you must open the account management panel (AMP) and click the "other" link in the Additional services section to find it.

Aside from that, the site builder worked perfectly and allowed us to create a functional template based website design in 15 minutes.

Our overall impression of Web Hosting Hub was definitely positive. All functions work flawlessly and don't require much effort to setup or work with. However there were minor issues in the control panel that first-time users may find confusing.

Technical Support

A range of support options won't let you down if anything goes the way you didn't expect. 24/7 phone support, e-mail support, community support and live chat not to mention various informational resources like knowledge base or video tutorials are available directly from cPanel. Unfortunately, there is no online ticket system, so for serious questions, should they arise, your only option is e-mail.

The e-mail response to our typical question was not prompt. It took 55 minutes, which is not adequate for real time support, and not even terrific for e-mail response. The sluggishness of the e-mail support is somewhat balanced by rapid live chat and phone call response, which were 2 minutes and 1 minute respectively.

Regardless of the support channel, the personnel were polite, informative and helpful.

Conclusion

Web Hosting Hub seems like a really good place to host your small online business or e-commerce website. For the agreeable price of $4.95/month you get one of those full-featured, "unlimited everything" accounts and zero setup problems as a bonus. Proven Dell servers show imposing reliability and speed, the control panel provides instant access to all standard and third-party functions, and, surprisingly, everything works with no hassles. Additionally, you get a decent website builder (really a cool one), plenty of scripts to install, and not only the now standard $75 Google credit, but the same amount for Yahoo Marketing as well.

And don't forget the huge 90-day money back guarantee and "no downtime" website transfer service.

The drawbacks are minor: daily backups of your site will cost you $1/month extra, some control panel features are hard for a novice client to discover. The technical support isn't always prompt, but you barely notice that as all functions operate like clock-work.

This extremely cost effective web host provides everything an average web master might need without asking much in return.