Affordable web hosting reviews - Web Hosting Guide and Advice

  Ranks #1, because their competative prices and their reliability.

Dot5 Hosting has quickly risen from relative obscurity to a top player, hosting thousands of customers at the iPowerweb data center (with whom they are a "Power Partner"). Their website is crisp and professional, and offers a wide range of bonus features on all accounts, including web templates, bulletin board and ecommerce software, and multimedia streaming support.

Reliability
We had a few hiccups during our time with Dot5, but nothing serious. Sometimes there were delays in the load times of PHP content, which became an off and on occurrence. The problem cleared up after some time and was not apparent throughout the rest of the test. That’s pretty good, being that when a problem like that develops, it is seldom resolved. Not many hosts are willing to put in the effort necessary to reduce server load once a problem with it develops. This is an indication of Dot5’s commitment to resolve even the more difficult issues that arise.

Price Value
Dot5 offers free domain registrations with its 1 and 2 year billing cycles and has no setup fee on any account or billing cycle. Not bad. For only $4.95 per month, Dot5 allows you to manage up to 6 domains on one account. With 200 GB space and 2000 GB monthly transfer shared between them, it's great value even if you only need to host a single domain. Their base package gives you all the features required to host your personal website or small business site and provides all of the space and flexibility you need to expand. Their plans include a fully-equipped Marketing Centre, a Web Site Creator, as many Shopping Carts as you need, a Search Engine Submitter, Search Engine Submitter Reports, a Keyword and Meta-Tag Generator, a Website Link Checker, and $50 Overture credit. All of this, at the price they offer, is a genuine deal.

  Ranks #2, because Overall, Vistapages is a great choice for your web hosting provider.

Vistapages has been providing web hosting services to customers since early 2004 and are well known for their amazing inexpensive web hosting plan called "VistaDeal" -- It sure is a deal! Let me tell you why! They only have 1 web hosting package, convientently called the "VistaDeal" shared hosting plan. With 350 GB of web storage and 3000 GB of data transfer, for only $6.95 per month, you'll never have to worry about being restrained on disk and transfer limitations or worry about breaking your wallet!

Reliability
The VistaDeal comes fully featured with PHP4/PHP5, CGI/Perl, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL to just name a few. You'll also enjoy the ability to host up to 16 domain names with one account, make use of unlimited e-mail accounts, parked domains, mailing lists, sub-domains and tons more! It's incredible at how much Vistapages gives away with just this one plan verses other hosting companies entire product line put together! Vistapages also throws in several dozen one-click, auto-install scripts, such as mailing list managers, content management systems, blogs, photo galleries and more, not to mention a free site builder for those of you who do not know how to build a web site.

Price Value
Vistapages' VistaDeal package is very affordable. The pricing break down is simple, they have 3 payment terms, month-to-month, yearly and 2-year prepaid plans. With their 2 year plan, you'll be able to get in a $6.95 per month with free setup, their 1 year plan is $7.95 per month with free setup and their month-to-month plan is $15.95 per month plus a $20 setup fee. Their service comes with an unconditional 30-day money back guarantee!

  Ranks #4, because BlueHost is an excellent choice, especially for customers who place a premium on performance and reliability.

BlueHost was founded in 1996 and is known for its inexpensive hosting plans and great performance. They are one of the larger hosting companies out there and provide customers with large amounts of web space and bandwidth, making their hosting solution a valuable commodity. Additionally, they offer several free script plug-ins such as, chat, blogs, polls, web auctions and bulletin boards. Supporting multiple features like, CGI, PHP, Perl, Front Page, MySQL Databases, ecommerce tools with a free shopping cart and the ability to track website traffic, BlueHost makes an all-in-one deal.

Reliability
BlueHost, during our review of their services, proved to have performance and reliability on par with the best shared hosts out there. They are conscious of not overloading their infrastructure, and of staying ahead of the load-curve by constantly expanding their data center. This factor stood out above all others and if performance is a paramount concern, BlueHost is definitely worth a look. We only experienced a few technical issues, all of which were resolved within a reasonable amount of time.

Price Value
Despite Bluehost’s great features, or perhaps on account of them, they do cost a little more than the other companies on this list to host with. If you prepay for 24 months, you do get the $30 set up fee waived and only pay an average of $6.95 per mo. BlueHost only offers Linux hosting. If you need Windows hosting, such as for ASP.NET or Microsoft data bases, you won’t be able to host with BlueHost. Overall, their hosting plan is a good bargain, especially for the performance and reliability they have achieved.

  Ranks #5, because Overall, AN Hosting left us with a good impression. Although not perfect enough to rank higher on our chart, they nonetheless are a great choice.

AN Hosting has been around since 2001 and in that time, has challenged its competition at every turn. Evolving into a serious player in the shared hosting market, AN Hosting now operates out of 3 facilities in 2 countries, and shows no sign of slowing down.

Reliability
Like many of the hosts on this list, the level of AN Hosting’s reliability was evident over the course of the review. We found the responsiveness of their servers to be excellent and were hard pressed to find complaint with this aspect of their service. They have implemented a generator in case of power failure and perform regular backups, something that more hosts should do, but tend not to.

Price Value
AN Hosting prices their single hosting plan, The Mega Plan, at about the middle of the road for shared hosting, starting at $6.95 per month. For this, you get 250 gigs of web space, 2500 gigs per month of transfer, room for 10 hosted domain names (upgradeable to 20 for $3 more a month), a free domain registration, database access, a range of guarantees and much more. While the webspace and transfer provided may not exceed what their competitors are offering at comparable prices, it is worth noting that the features included with the plan are superb and in our opinion, more than compensate for the high but ordinary amount of web space and transfer included and in all fairness, none if any websites require more resources than this.

  Ranks #6, because Lunarpages is not bad at all. In addition to the quality of their services, they have shown a heart, offering free hosting accounts to all public schools in the Unites States.

Lunarpages serves as the web hosting division of Add2Net, Inc. Its staff and technical support team has established an impressive six year history in the web hosting industry. This is relatively long considering that most web hosting companies are fly-by-night operations and in all reality, you need a company that will always be around. Lunarpages has earned a reputation as a provider with superior customer support and a solid data center. Unlike most web hosting companies, you can always get through the phone line with Lunarpages. Also, the $6.95 monthly plan offers everything you need in order to make the presence of your business successful on the web.

Reliability
Lunarpages has a long track record of offering quality hosting, with reliability and support representing cornerstones of their corporate culture. We experienced very little in the way of problems there and were impressed with the responsiveness of their staff in addressing those issues that did arise. Overall, their reliability is good, very good compared to most hosts, especially shared hosts. This alone easily landed them on our top 10 chart.

Price Value
Lunarpages offers decent pricing on their web-hosting plans. For a mere $6.95 a month, you receive 250 GB of space and 2500 GB of traffic per month. They also offer a $21.95 web-hosting package, which sports unlimited storage and a phenomenal 3 terabytes of monthly transfer. For most users, the $6.95 plan, the Basic Hosting plan, is sufficient, but it’s great to see a shared host offering as robust a plan as their Business Hosting plan for those with exceptional needs. They also offer Windows hosting and even Virtual Private Servers. All of their plans offer at least one free domain name registration, database support, web software such as blogs, forums, and Fantastico. They are among the more pricey of hosts, but are also among the most generous.