Free Webhosting Reviews & Ratings - Top Webhosting Services 2009

How to choose affordable and reliable UNIX web hosting plan?

There are many options when it comes to an affordable web hosting plan. Of course, the price tag depends on many things; the technology used being one of the main factors. There are many technologies and platforms out there for web hosting, with UNIX (including UNIX variants such as Linux, FreeBSD etc.) and Windows being the two main platforms.

People choose one of the two platforms above for different reasons. Overall, UNIX hosting is cheaper and more affordable than Windows, as Windows comes with much more proprietary software as opposed to the open source software used in UNIX platforms.

Identify Your Requirements for Hosting

Before choosing a UNIX web hosting plan, you need to evaluate your needs for a web hosting plan. Create a list of all your needs and what you expect from the web hosting plan. Then decide which package is the most suitable one for you. Surprisingly, you may sometimes find that UNIX hosting is not the ideal for you and you may decide to settle down with Windows hosting. Once you know what exactly you want, then it’s time to start looking at the web hosting plans.

UNIX vs. Windows Hosting

There are many differences between UNIX and Windows hosting environments. Let’s discuss a few of them.

Although we call it UNIX web hosting, Linux, a variant of UNIX is the most popular operating system for hosting web applications. Linux is freely available on the Internet, complete with all the software needed for enterprise capacity web hosting. Therefore, when hosting in a Linux environment, the customer pays only for the value added services and the infrastructure. Windows, on the other hand, can cost you a lot of money, as the operating system and the other software for hosting a web application come at a price.

Flexibility is one of the most important differences between the two operating systems. In Linux, you are in full control of the platform and the software used as the source code is available for your use. If you are not satisfied with certain behaviors or the functionality of this supporting software or the platform, you can easily change it by changing the source code and recompiling it.

Why UNIX is Cheap and What to Consider When Choosing UNIX Hosting Plans

When it comes to affordability, UNIX hosting plans are the best as they are the cheapest around the Internet. Due to the reasons explained above, they cost the hosting companies a minimum amount of money. Reliability is the other factor for choosing a hosting plan. If your website suffers from frequent downtimes, then you have a big problem. Since UNIX (including Linux) is one of the most stable operating systems available today, you will not suffer from reliability issues, provided that the hosting company does not have bottlenecks for bandwidth and disk space. When you choose an affordable UNIX web hosting plan, make sure you go with exactly what you need as this further reduces your cost.

Is It Worth Getting An Affordable Web Site Hosting Provider?

Affordability had many interpretations throughout the evolution of the Internet. Some time ago, affordable web site hosting meant spending around $20 to $30 a month for hosting a web site with a single domain name. You got a couple of hundreds of megabytes as the disk space and couple of gigabytes as the bandwidth. If you were to install web applications, then you were given one to five MySQL databases and you had to pay extra if you needed more. In addition to that, you had to pay extra for Frontpage extensions, SSL, eCommerce, and other features.

Times have changed and we get more from an affordable web site hosting package. If you pay more than $10 a month for your unlimited disk space, bandwidth, MySQL databases etc. hosting package, then it is time for you to change your web hosting service provider.

When it comes to affordable web site hosting, nowadays you get many things that were ‘luxury’ some time ago. Unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth are examples of features that come with every basic package of affordable web site hosting. Control Panel (CPanel) is one of the other important features, which gives the users the ultimate control over the websites and domains that are hosted in the environment. In the good old days, CPanel access was only given to site administrators, and the regular users were only given the FTP access.

Hosting a single domain was the old idea of budget web site hosting. Now you can host unlimited parked and sub domains with an affordable web site hosting package.

When it comes to email addresses, still there are limitations with affordable web site hosting packages. Many of the affordable web site hosting packages give you a limited number of email addresses. But you can still demand an unlimited number of email addresses with a catchall email address.

There are a few other things that should come with cheap web site hosting packages. The member forum is a valuable resource that you get with one of these packages. Since all the customers of the same web hosting company have access to this forum, they can talk about problems and their solutions. This helps members to organize in a formal manner and demand changes or enhancements of their service from the web hosting company.

Toll-free support is one of the other important features to consider when getting an affordable web site hosting solution. These support centers should help you within a few hours’ time of your problem’s occurrence and should operate 24×7. If this is not the case, then you should look for another affordable web site hosting service provider.

A customer account page is a must with an affordable web site hosting package. You should be able to maintain a profile with billing information stored securely for future use with the web hosting service provider.

How Useful Are Web Hosting Provider Reviews?

What are Web Hosting Reviews?

Have you ever bought a car? When you settled with a particular model, what did you do next? I’m sure you Googled the brand and the model for more details such as fuel consumption, spare parts prices, performance of the car, recommendations from existing users of the same model, etc. Once you got to know almost everything you wanted to know, you made the decision for or against buying the car.

When it comes to choosing a web hosting service provider, the story follows the same pattern. Since there are many things to consider when choosing a web hosting service provider, it is always useful to search for background information on the company. You can simply go to their website and get a lot of information, but the more independent information comes from other sources.

There are many web hosting provider reviews available on the Internet. These reviews talk about pros and cons of certain web hosting service providers in an independent manner. Once a while you may find a lot of criticism from a disappointed customer, but that is not really the entire picture for the service provider. When going through the reviews, you should consider only the independent reviews as they give you more balanced information for your own use.

Who Writes Web Hosting Reviews?

There are many interested parties who write web hosting reviews. The existing customers of a particular web hosting company write reviews about their service provider, most probably when something prompts them to. As an example, if the customer start experiencing bad customer service from the web hosting service provider, then there will be a review in his/her blog explaining what he/she has gone through with this web host.

Then there are independent parties, mostly websites and blogging sites, interested in sharing information about web hosting service providers. These sites provide the visitors web hosting provider reviews written by either the regular users of the site or the staff. New reviews are published everyday and some of the websites have become popular on the Internet as reliable sources for web hosting provider reviews.

What are the Advantages of Web Hosting Provider Reviews?

There are many advantages of web hosting provider reviews. Like the example of buying a car, you get a lot of information on what are you getting into. These reviews list down the services offered by the web hosting company and how effective and of what quality the services are. Based on your requirements and what you expect when it comes to quality, you will now be able to make a better judgment on the web hosting service provider.

A sufficient unbiased review will provide a potential customer with most important information about the hosting service provider. Web hosting provider reviews should be used as only the supporting material for your decision. You need to carry out your own mini-research on targeted web hosting service providers.

Where can I find quality, reliable Budget Web hosting?

What is Budget Web Hosting?

With the bad economic conditions, we all try to make our expenses less and profits higher. To cater to the lower segments of the web hosting market, budget web hosting was introduced by lowering the quality and the features of the standard high quality web hosting. Although it started as a scaled-down version of standard web hosting, soon it became a competitor for standard web hosting as they could catch up on the features and the quality of service offered to the customers of standard web hosting.

How to get free domain names?

What is a free domain?

I’m sure you have already heard about free web hosting. Free web hosting sites such as Yahoo! GeoCities offers you free web space (although it is just a few MBs) for hosting your html files. You never pay a fee for this type of web hosting, but instead, Yahoo! displays advertisements in your pages.

Free domain names behave the same way as free web hosting. But there is a fundamental difference. When it comes to free web hosting, the host can display advertisements in the web pages as the host has control over the web space given to you. 

HostPapa Site Hosting Review

HostPapa Web Hosting is a private web hosting Provider in Canada and for years they offer a top-quality hosting service in Canada, they recently bought the .com domain and opened their office in Niagara Falls, New York, USA and Toronto, Canada. The motto at HosPapa web hosting is “Let Papa take care of you” to show every one of their customers are considered to be a part of HostPapa Hosting family.

iPowerWeb Hosting Review

iPowerWeb Hosting is now one of the largest hosting providers worldwide with 300,000 customers and 700,000 websites. In fact iPowerWeb hosting since 2001 offers a comprehensive hosting plan that meets requirements of everybody from Webmasters, Developers, Designers to personal web publishers.

1&1 Web Hosting Review

1&1 web hosting is the world’s biggest and the fastest growing web hosting provider with 6.39 million customers. 1and1 web hosting provides a complete range of web packages for every need, every skill level and every budget including cheap domain name and web hosting. All 1&1 products have been designed to provide the ideal combination of features and affordability.

At 1&1 web hosting you get quality, reliability and security at the same time as well as domain name registration.

PowWeb Web Site Hosting Review

PowWeb web hosting was founded in 1999 and has established a leadership position in the “low cost” Web hosting industry by meeting the needs of small-to-medium sized businesses and now they serve more than 100,000 customers. They offer a One Plan strategy. PowWeb web site hosting has developed its own custom Web hosting software tailored to customers’ requirements. PowWeb web site hosting infrastructure has been developed in-house by PowWeb’s programmers and developers. PowWeb web site hosting manage, own and operate the entire network and all equipment. PowWeb’s Load-Balanced server technology ensures a 99.99% uptime.

LunarPages Web Site Hosting Review

LunarPages web site hosting was established in 2000 and after 7 years they provide hosting services to more than 100,000 happy customers. LunarPages web site hosting now provides shared hosting as well as reseller, dedicated, and VPS Hosting Plans. LunarPages web site hosting offers an affordable, and reliable web hosting, provides fast, and secure processors, hosts over 100,000 customers worldwide, operates out of the most prestigious, state-of-the-art datacenters. If you are an adult webmaster, then you have found one of the best adult web hosting companies.