Ratings

Price

100

User Interface

99

Server Quality

100

Add On Features

85

Customer Service

94

Business Ethics

100

Pros & Cons

Pros

Hands down best price for web hosting services offered

New interface called vDeck offers clean/easy website management

vDeck allows Ipage to price cheaply

Really fast loading times

Pretty good customer service

Low prices in 2013 to grow customer base

Cons

Uses new technology "vDeck" for hosting interface

Prices may rise a little in the future

Ipage

Ipage is relatively new to the web hosting industry after they were recently acquired by EIG (same company that runs , bluehost, hostmonster, justhost) they started building a substantial customer base and are now one of the leading hosting providers.

For the price I think Ipage offers the most competitive hosting service on the web. My guess is the price will go up a little in 2014, however I think it will always be a couple bucks cheaper than bluehost.

So why is Ipage so cheap? All in all Ipage is really good and very comparable to what you would get with bluehost, however there is one slight catch. Ipage uses a different interface for managing all your hosting services, this interface is called vDeck and is a relatively new piece of technology, at least compared to it’s its more popular and well known rival cPanel. cPanel is licenced software meaning hosting companies have to pay for it for every new customer they acquire. vDeck is cheaper for hosting companies to licence than cPanel, this allows hosting companies to pass the savings onto their customers.

From working with vDeck it seems to offers all the main features that cPanel provides and has a nicer interface (aka looks prettier). However given that it is a new technology and does not have years of fine tuning it is likely to experience some issues that will need fixing/upgrades as time goes on. For the vast the majority of businesses/individuals looking for hosting, vDeck should work fine. Although I have to say I don't love the idea of replacing cPanel as so many people are familiar with it and it - and it works so dang well.

As far as site performance Ipage is the second fastest at of all the shared hosting providers (see fastest web hosting companies here.) - meaning your Ipage site will load really fast.

Ipage also provides a good amount of flexibility when working with PHP. They provide access to the "php.ini" file which allows you to change the majority of PHP settings. The one small downside is they do not have PHP version 5.4 but rather 5.3. This is fine for most website, but may cause issues for those looking to run the latest PHP technologies. They also do not provide a simple way to install PHP extensions - you can read my article on understanding what you need in a PHP hosting provider for more information.

My experience with their customer service has been fine, although like other shared providers it various substantially based on who you talk to. All the technical support I have talked to do their best to solve your problem, and although I usually have to figure stuff out myself, I still give them "A" for effort.

To summarize: If you are a small business or individual and have not heard of cPanel or are willing to use a different interface for managing your website hosting, I have to recommend to Ipage, they are simply way too cheap and offer way too much to ignore.

Ratings

Price

80

User Interface

98

Server Quality

80

Add On Features

95

Customer Service

95

Business Ethics

80

Pros & Cons

Pros

Web hosting Industry leader

Most robust cpanel and feature offering for small business web hosting

Has really simple Wordpress , Weebly and Simple Scripts installation

Customer service is above average

Has lots of promotions including $50/facebook add credit, $100 adwords credit

Easy to use multiple domain hosting for no extra cost

Best User interface among all the web hosting providers

Cons

Can't upgrade to higher teer of service if your site really high traffic

"Unlimited Filespace" is in fact pretty limited

Not the fastest performance

Blue Host

I am reviewing Blue Host, Hostmonster and Just Host as one hosting provider because they are all owned and operated by the same company (Endurance International Group). All three hosting services are pretty much identical, from time to time you will see them differ slightly, but this is simply the company tweaking it's business model with A/B testing to see what product works the best. Endurance International group owns many website hosting providers, see a full list here if you are curious.

In my honest opinion Blue Host is the best hosting option for 90% of individuals/businesses looking for web hosting. They have set the industry standard that all other hosting companies are attempting to imitate or spin off. Blue Host provides a incredibly easy to use to interface that allows you to manage tons of hosting features. They offer the best PHP hosting on the web including the newest version PHP 5.4 with full "php.ini" access for changing setting and they have simple interface for PHP extensions install.

They like many other claim to have “unlimited” hosting space, which is simply not true. It is however sufficient for the vast majority of small businesses and individuals. They also offer by the best interface for managing multiple domains and websites under one account. To give you a ruff Idea I currently host around 30 small businesses websites with them and rarely have any issues with there servers getting bogged down.

Blue Host targets small businesses and individuals, the one big downside to hosting with them is they do not offer any sort of server upgrades, meaning if your site starts to get really heavy traffic (10k) plus visitors/day your website will start to slow down. This is really a non factor though since any sites getting 10k+ visitors should move to professional grade hosting which costs closer to $100/month.

Ratings

Price

90

User Interface

70

Server Quality

90

Add On Features

80

Customer Service

90

Business Ethics

90

Coupon Codes

SAVEPERCENT25 25% OFF

SAVENINENINEFOUR $9.94 OFF

Pros & Cons

Pros

Hosting Upgrades

Proffesional teer hosting

Price

Cons

Difficult to manage multiple domains

Poor user interface

Lack of "freebies"

Technical support for professional teer hosting

Host Gator

Host Gator is an interesting hosting provider because they seem to merge the low tier hosting business model with the professional grade hosting model. What I mean by this is they offer a hosting package for small businesses at around $6/month and they also offer dedicated VPS hosting all the way up to around $200/month for some serious computing power. The fact that they offer such a wide array of hosting packages makes them more appealing for companies that plan on getting high traffic in the near future, allowing them to start with the cheap option then upgrade as needed.

The biggest downside to Host Gator is their relatively poor user interface. They actually offer most of the same features as other hosting providers, however their interface makes it harder to access these features. Their most notable flaw in my opinion is their lack of GOOD support for managing multiple domains. They only recently offered the ability to manage multiple domains at all and now their interface for doing so is simple not user friendly. The big issue here is they tie their hosting management interface to a particular domain name. For example to access their Cpanel you would go to “www.myexampledomain.com/cpanel”. As you might imagine if you have ten domain names this causes serious issues in managing all those domains under one hosting account. They seem to have realized this flaw and hopefully they will fix it the near future.

One other downside to Host Gator is they do not offer too much in the way of freebies/add ons. For most people this is not a huge deal, but many other hosting providers offer promotions like free Google Adwords credit and free facebook ads credits. Those freebies can be really nice and save you a few hundred bucks, which is great when you are getting started with advertising like Google Adwords.

As far as customer service I have found Host Gator to be “Ho Hem”, they usually try to be helpful but they are clearly not very technically savvy. This is not a huge shock, however it concerns me for those business who choose to use Host Gators professional teer hosting services (ie:$150/month). Generally hosting companies who offer this level of computing power for hosting, also have some serious GEEKS behind the computers to help you out when you need it. Since Host Gator lacks those people, I would be wary about hosting serious websites (100k+/monthly visitors) with them.

All in all Host Gator offers a hosting service that IMO only fits the needs of a small market. I would consider that market bloggers who may be getting enough traffic to need more serious hosting solutions, but at the same time don't need a high level of technical support.

Ratings

Price

90

User Interface

60

Server Quality

90

Add On Features

70

Customer Service

70

Business Ethics

90

Pros & Cons

Pros

Multiple Domain Management

Offer Windows Hosting

Cons

Poor User Interface

Lack of Cpanel

Hidden Fees

Go Daddy

O Boy here we go! Godaddy has more domains registered through them than any other hosting company in the world. On first glance they appear to the cheapest hosting provider however this usually ends up not being the case, as they sell you almost everything individually. Bottom line is you will end up paying more or just as much hosting your website on Godaddy as you would with any other hosting provider.

Godaddy chose not to use Cpanel, but rather develop their own customer solutions for managing domains/hosting and other features. This was a HORRIBLE decision, their user interface is worse than dreadful. For example to do a simple thing like upload a file to the server you have to log in like 10 times, accidently buy a few things then navigate a maze of confusion just to finally get at what you need. Their system literally logs you out every few minutes, so by the time you get where you need to be you will probably be logged out again. To put it subtly, their user interface needs a massive overhaul.

So why are they such a dominate force? I believe for a few reasons, they actually do a few things really well. The first thing they do really well is market their products and strategically price to gain a large customer base (hints all those hot Godaddy girls). They also offer great affiliate incentives, so besides this review you likely won't see too many negative reviews popping up on google. The other thing they do really well is domain registration and management. Godaddy offer a huge marketplace for purchasing domains, including what I believe to be the best & biggest domain auction in the world. To be fair, their user interface for managing and purchasing domains is actually quite good, likely the best among all hosting provider. I believe since they are so good at selling domains, people just say what the heck and also purchase hosting with them - which is perfectly logical since it's easier to purchase domain + hosting through the same provider.

My one other concern with Godaddy is their pricing practices border the line of unethical, meaning they hit you with hidden fees. I personally own hundreds of domains through them and often will get hit with odd charges, an example is if a domain dispute arises they charge you like $20/bucks, they also make it conveniently simple for domain disputes to arise. Hmmm.....

To summarize Godaddy is the best in the businesses when it comes to buying and selling a domain names. If you need to purchase and manage a lot of domains, they are your go to provider. When it comes to web hosting their pricing is comparable with other hosting providers, however since they do not offer Cpanel and have a poor user interface for managing web hosting features I would NOT recommend them as a web hosting provider.

Ratings

Price

85

User Interface

90

Server Quality

85

Add On Features

95

Customer Service

99

Business Ethics

85

Pros & Cons

Pros

SSH/Root Access

Excellent Customer Service

Professional Grade Computing Power

SSD Hard Drive

Cons

Highly technical knowledge required

Expensive compared to "small business hosting"

RAM bottleneck

Beyond Hosting

Beyond hosting is a professional grade hosting company, they are a relatively small hosting company but still plenty big enough to ensure they are not going anywhere anytime soon. This is a hosting provider I would only recommend to companies who have an in house professional web developer or some sort of dedicated computer GEEK. They do not offer the same “ease of use” as the other hosting providers (small business web hosting providers).They offer professional grade linux hosting packages, some packages include Cpanel some do not. If you are used to working with Cpanel then get the Centos or Fedora OS which comes with Cpanel, otherwise you can just manage everything via SSH/Shell (You do have Root access).

Personally I am a Ubuntu Guy, I host about 30 websites on one of their VPS servers which costs me about $60/month. They offer a huge amount of Bandwidth, Disk Space, and CPU power for $60/month the only trouble is they bottleneck the RAM. This is partially a PHP issues, but since most use PHP, I believe it's a known bottleneck used so you have to upgrade your hosting package. Even so, the computing power is still well worth it.

The big plus to going with Beyond Hosting is their technical support is REALLY GOOD. These are actual professional server administrators you are talking with, nut just $10/hour patsies. For example, they noticed that my account was pushing IO pretty hard and they took the initiative to upgrade my hard drive to SSD, the IO is no longer an issue. This is the kind of technical support that you simply WILL NOT get with the $6/month hosting providers.

To summarize, Beyond hosting is great for those who have professional hosting needs and have a highly technical person who feels comfortable working on a linux shell.

Ratings

Price

98

User Interface

97

Server Quality

98

Add On Features

70

Customer Service

89

Business Ethics

98

Pros & Cons

Pros

Easy to use Website Builder

No Technical knowledge required

Great Pricing

Cons

No Cpanel

Lack of flexibility

1 & 1

1 &1 is a new comer that seems to be making some waves in the web hosting world. I personally do not manage any websites using 1 & 1, but many of my clients do so I thought their product is definitely worth a closer look.

1 & 1 offer a similar hosting package to that of Blue Host except instead of having a standard Cpanel they have developed their own “Website Builder”. Even though I hate the fact they don't have Cpanel, I must admit that their website builder is probably the most intuitive and easy to use interface on the market.

Basically anyone with little to no computer experience will be able to register a domain and get a website up and running in a day or so. This is unique in that most other hosting providers assume some level of computer savely 1 &1 simply does not. The flip side to this is since they offer such a simple user interface, some more technical things are difficult or simply not available. In other words they do not provide a lot of flexibility for your website.

If you are a non technical individual looking to get a website up yourself I think 1 & 1 is a great option. They are extremely competitively priced, they offer enough functionality to allow you to get up a decent website and no technical skills are required. I think for musicians, at home businesses, actors and other 1-3 person businesses 1 &1 is a great website hosting option.