Use Web Hosting Forums to Find A Host
Open web hosting forum is one of the most important place to collect reviews and comments from real customers, and find a host. Anyone, including you and me and web hosting customers, is free to express his/her opinion. Almost every post remains unedited.
Web hosting forums have different types of post and reviews. Web hosting providers or business owners write favorable reviews for their company or business. Competitors write negative reviews. Fortunately, these are not the common cases. And if there are any doubts for the reviewer’s credibility, forum users can ask for explanations. Forum moderators, usually web hosting experts, often browse posts and remove what should be removed.
When we are reading a web hosting review, it is important who writes the review. The more posts a reviews has, the longer he has been a member of the forum, the more credit we should give him/her. And we may pay attention to the reviewer’s profile and signature. If he/she has a website hosted by the reviewed host, that means he/she has nothing to hide and we may use his/her website as sample.
My favorite web hosting forum is WebHostingTalk (WHT). This forum has only one focus - web hosting, covers all topics from shared hosting to dedicated hosting. If I can visit only one forum to collect reviews and comments, WHT is my choice with no doubt.
If you decide to start a search for hosts, it is good to have a relatively long initial list of hosts to start with (say 20 or so). Then you must find and read as many reviews as you can about each of them. Your goal should be to gradually eliminate hosts until you only have to choose between 2-5 of them - the fewer the better. Now you can post a thread on web hosting forums with these 2-5 hosts, asking for review and comment. The post should include detail information, such as how much storage space and bandwidth you need, how many visitors you will have, what technical specification your website requires. With these detail information, you will receive much more useful feedback than the post with only a few words such as “What is the best hosts?”.
Support forums of web hosting companies are important when searching for a host. Hosts use such forums to allow customers to interact to each other and also as an alternative means to provide support. Great is the fact that you can see what/if problems occur often and how problems are dealt with. The ultimate benefit is that you can contact their customers and find out what they think about the service: are they satisfied, did they notice certain problems that never get solved etc. If you find that the company delete threads that may damage their reputation, instead of solving the problems, you should ignore that company immediately.
JustHost and HostMonster have good reputation on WHT. You can search their name on WHT for reviews from real customers. Of course you can read my JustHost review and HostMonster review for reference.
User Comment for JustHost and IXWebHosting
WebHostingTalk (WHT) is a forum for discussing all types of web hosting, from shared web hosting to dedicated hosting. Many users give comments and reviews for different types of web hosting. The following comment is sited from WHT.
@grado
if you looking for cheap one, try justhost, with the coupons you can get 50% off in the first year. (From Mike: We have JustHost Review and 50% off coupon) No.1 award host winner in 2008. but you have to do your own backup with using this hosting, no firewall provided. if you want to have to pay extra money.
if you try to find a hosting with file protection and daily back up function,try ixwebhosting, they have 20% off, I forgot the coupon. you can check on the google. (From Mike: We have IXWebHosting Review and 20% off coupon) Price will be 47% higher than justhost and hostmonster.
other hosting is too expensive and service is not good, like godaddy, hostgear.
you also can try hostmonser, service seems like justhost.com
I highly suggest use these two, justhost for low budget, ixwebhosting for high security. both are Top 5 hosting provider in US.
How to Reduce Spam or Junk Email When Using JustHost
Exchanging links and commenting on other’s blogs are routine for webmasters with the purpose of getting inbound links. In these scenarios, you have to fill in your email address. Once your email address is taken down, spam or junk emails will appear in your email box now and then. Here are some tips to reduce spam or junk email when using JustHost.
Spam Assassin, a spam filter in JustHost, is very helpful. It is a software running inside the JustHost servers. It checks each email your email box receives and filter the junk email to a junk email folder. Using Spam Assassin is even easier than you expect. It is built in the cPanel, requires no installation and configuration. Firstly, log into cPanel of JustHost and find the “Email Management” menu. Then click on “Spam Assassin” and select “Enable Spam Assassin”. Now, your spam filter is set up and running.
Using more than one email address is another tips to reduce spam or junk email. For example I use mike@mikeshostingwatch.com (of course this is a false email address) for personal communication with my friends, use public@mikeshostingwatch.com (false email address as well) for blog commenting and forum discussion. I try my best not to leave the personal email address to any public areas on the Internet. Because many automated bots crawl the web collecting email addresses 24/7. In result, mike@mikeshostingwatch.com will receive no junk email, and the public ones will receive many junk emails. With the help of spam filter, it is easy to find out real emails in public email box.
JustHost can set up unlimited email accounts. It is totally free and easy to set up. So you can use the tips above with no extra cost.
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JustHost Review – A WordPress Recommeded Web Hosting
34SP.com Celebrates 9 Years of Hosting with Giveaway
UK website hosting firm 34SP.com is celebrating its ninth anniversary, by giving away 9 great prizes designed specifically to mark the occasion. The company was founded by Manchester University colleagues Daniel Foster and Stuart Melling.
Despite its growth, the website hosting industry is a relatively new business segment. With mergers, acquisitions and the threat of continuously increasing competition, it is a testament to a company’s perseverance when that firm reaches the nine year mark.
34SP.com is located in Manchester, United Kingdom and specializes in providing the highest levels of customer service and technical support for website hosting and domain names.Over the past 9 years the company has solidified a reputation for outstanding support, coupled with extremely high reliability at fair prices. A complete list of the company’s website hosting products can be viewed at: www.34sp.com/hosting.
Stuart Melling, co-founder of 34SP.com explained, ”We thought it would be great to reward clients with a truly valuable prize for each year that 34SP.com has been in the website hosting business. It has been a great challenge to grow as we have over the past 9 years and continue to offer our clients world class support, but we are gratified to have had the opportunity to serve our customers over the past 9 years. We are very much looking forward to the next 9 years.”
Anyone who purchases any 34SP.com product during the month of October is eligible to win the ‘9 Years of Hosting, 9 Great Prizes’ contest. Winners will be determined by a random drawing at the end of the month. The prizes being offered are:
* New Apple iPod nano with Camera 8GB (5th Generation)
* Toshiba Satellite L350-20G 17-inch Laptop
* Canon Powershot 12.1 MegaPixel Camera
* Western Digital Elements 1TeraByte USB 2.0 External Hard Drive
* Canon Selphy ES40, a Portable Talking Printer (yes, you read that right - it talks)
* Sony DVPFX730 7-inch Portable DVD Player
* Flip Video Ultra High Definition Camcorder With 8GB Memory
* Toshiba 19AV615DB 19-inch Widescreen HD Ready LCD TV
* The Beatles Rock Band - Limited Edition Premium Bundle
You may like these web hosting reviews:
JustHost Review – A WordPress Recommeded Web Hosting
IXWebHosting Review – A Reputable Web Hosting
Is JustHost Right for My Web Sites?
Is JustHost right for my web sites? You must evaluate the following before answering this question.
1. Web Site Content
The most important is that contents on your web site must obey the laws. JustHost will NOT provide service to web sites of hacking, hosting files that infringes on another’s copyright or other intellectual property rights, hosting or distributing child pornography. The typical type of content of above content is MP3, movies and music videos. If you are not the copyright holder of these content, JustHost will terminate your account without refunding when they detect them.
JustHost do NOT accept the following types of web sites, including prirated software / warez, image, filedump or banner-ad services (similar to photobucket, rapidshare), proxy servers, hacker focused sites or sites promoting illegal activities.
2. Web Site Traffic
Web hosting companies always set resource usage limit for accounts on the shared web hosting servers. Please refer to The CPU and Resource Usage Limit of JustHost. For blog sites running on WordPress, typically a daily traffic of 5,000 – 8,000 visitors should not exceed the resource limit. However, if you have built several web sites under the same account, you should add up all traffic of these sites to evaluate. Normally, tiny and small web sites are targets of JustHost shared hosting plans.
3. Software Application and Technical Requirement
JustHost is similar to other PHP web hostings (please refer to my JustHost Review). JustHost’s servers can run almost all common software applications developed by PHP. These applications include WordPress (blog software), Joomla (CMS software), osCommerce (eCommerce software) and etc. JustHost does NOT support ASP. We have to pay more attention to applications of Microsoft Windows when selecting software applications for JustHost servers.
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The CPU and Resource Usage Limit of JustHost
The CPU and Resource Usage Limit of JustHost
Every web hosting company set a resource usage limit for the shared web hosting users. The main limit are memory and CPU usage limit. Usually they list the exact limit in detail on the Terms & Conditions page. JustHost is not an exception.
The CPU usage limit of JustHost is 10%. JustHost’s server management software detects and track down the accounts in which the web sites or programs use more than 10% of CPU. When your account is tracked down for many times, JustHost will ask you to upgrade to a higher plan.
If your account exceed the limit only because your web sites have so many visitors, congratulations! The value of so many visitors is much greater than the money of upgrade to VPS or dedicated server. That’s for sure. Your visitors may have better experience after the upgrade and will bring more visitors for you. Another possibility is that you have not so many visitors, your web site program consumes too much resource and has poor performance. In this case, you have to optimize the program by yourself or other experienced programmers.
Besides the CPU usage limit, JustHost forbids users to run software that uses 25% or more of system resource for longer than 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems. Some PHP and CGI scripts developed in incorrect methods are examples in this case. When using PHP include functions for including a local PHP file, include the local file rather than the URL. Instead of include (“http://www.yourdomain.com/include.php”), use include(“include.php”).
Many server-side software are forbidden to run on JustHost’s servers. They includes IRC related software, web spider or indexer, bit torrent applications, game servers and file-sharing/peer-to-peer applications.
Any cron job with intervals less than 15 minutes is not allowed by JustHost.
Disk Space Limit of JustHost
JustHost claims that their plans provide unlimited disk space to store your files. Is that true? The answer is obviously negative! They limit the disk space in your account by the INODES.
JustHost explain the detail of INODES and limitation in the Terms & Conditions page. The max INODES number for each account is 50,000. Each file in the account uses 1 INODES. So all files, including web page files (htm or html files, php files), image files (jpg, bmp, gif) and even email message in all your email box, are counted for INODES. When the INODES of your account exceed the limit of 50,000, JustHost will remove your account from the backup list. If your INODES slightly exceed the limit, your account will not be suspended. However, if you often create and delete many files, or store a large sum of files in only one folder, JustHost will detect and suspend your account for review.
Let us take a WordPress blog site as a sample. WordPress system contains around 1,500 files after installation. We often upload some templates and plug-in to enhance the blog. A WordPress blog site contains around 2,000 files from startup, and will contain more files in the future. So, a JustHost account can support around 20 WordPress blog sites.
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JustHost Review – A Web Hosting Recommended by WordPress
JustHost Review – A Web Hosting Recommended by WordPress
JustHost is a rising star of the web hosting market in recent years, wins more and more market share. Unlike WebHostingPad who uses low price strategy in the web hosting market, JustHost offers high performance and stability with a attractive price of $3.95/month. JustHost is in the web hosting list authorized by WordPress official web site. The list contains only 6 big names, including BlueHost, DreamHost, Godaddy etc.
 Visit JustHost |
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1. Plan Features (Click for detail)
JustHost offers only 2 plans: JustPlan and JustPlan Premium. I have checked features for several times, in order to find out the difference between these 2 plans. The only difference is that, JustPlan provides 1 free domain, JustPlan Premium provides 3 free domains. However, JustPlan only charges $3.95/month, JustPlan Premium charges $8.95/month. The price difference is $60 for 1 year between them. I can register more than 6 domains with $60. How ridiculous the JustPlan Premium is! All webmasters should choose JustPlan in no hesitate.
JustHost provides a web hosting like many other Linux / PHP web hostings. The plan offers unlimited storage and traffic, hosts unlimited websites and unlimited MySQL database. PHP, Ruby (RoR), CGI, Perl and Python is supported. JustHost uses the #1 rated control panel, cPanel. With this popular control panel software, you will have no difficulty in managing the server. Many tutorials and how-to information about cPanel can be found on the internet. That’s much better than HSphere which is the control panel of IXWebHosting. In cPanel, you can install WordPress, b2evolution, Joomla on your web sites with only ONE click. No professional knowledge and experience is required in the whole process of all these installation. You can have powerful web sites with professional layout in seconds.
All JustHost’s servers have quad processors, running on Linux. With customized Apache web server software, the servers are in high performance. All servers have backup battery bay and generator, which results in high uptime. All servers have OC-96 backbone connections.
2. Pros
I am impressed by the high performance and reliability of JustHost. The reason for that is JustHost’s servers are not oversold so much.
Any time money-back guarantee is another important reason to put JustHost in my recommendation list. Most web hosting companies only provide 30-day money-back guarantee. HostMonster is the only one company providing such guarantee among the big names in this industry. This guarantee means that you can cancel the subscription and take back the remain money in any time.
3. Cons
Not offering a lowest price in the web hosting industry is a minor defect for JustHost. Compared with $1.95/month from WebHostingPad, $3.95/month is much higher. You can use our 50%-off coupon code.
JustHost do not provide daily backup. You have to handle backup yourself or pay them extra money. I do not like this!
4. Conclusion
JustHost is the #1 web hosting in my recommendation list. The reason is very simple. They have achieved the best balance of price and high performance / reliability in the industry. WebHostingPad offers the lowest price with some limitation. HostMonster offers the same high performance / reliability with $5.95/month.
IXWebHosting Review – A Reputable Cheap Hosting Company
IXWebHosting is a web hosting company with 10 years history. When many other web hosting companies are busy outsourcing their business, IXWebHosting builds its own data centers, develops control panel software. With this strategy, they hold a balance between cost and performance and earn a good reputation in the industry.
1. Overview of Hosting Plans (Click for Plan Details)
IXWebHosting provides three hosting plans: Expert, Business and Unlimited. These plans share some common features including: hosting unlimited multiple domains, unlimited space and bandwidth, MySQL support, etc. The plans provide features which most usual Linux/PHP share web hosting companies supports.
Windows hosting is available with Business and Unlimited plan. The features include ASP/ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, MS Access, Microsoft SQL 2005, ODBC/DSN. If you need a windows hosting plan, Expert plan should not be your option. As for database features, MySQL database and PostgreSQL database is limited to 50 with Expert and Business plan. And the total database quota is 1GB, 5GB and 10GB with Expert, Business and Unlimited plan respectively. Providing FREE dedicated IP addresses is the most impressive feature of IXWebHosting. We have to pay about $30/year for a single dedicated IP address in the plans of other web hosting companies. Providing up to 15 free IP addresses is definitely a big-save.
2. Pros
The plans of IXWebHosting have low prices with powerful features and high enough performance. The plans with less than $5/month are classified as cheap share web hostings in the industry. Most reputable web hosting companies are competing in this market and providing such plans. However, many similar plans have limitations, such as limited multiple domains and limited database. The Expert plan priced at $3.95/month is powerful enough for most startup web sites which are based on those hosting plans priced higher than $5/month.
The speed of IXWebHosting servers is satisfying. I use a world wide ping service to detect a real web site on IXWebHosting servers. Ping from different place in US and Canada, the ping time varies from 30 to 80 ms. In Europe, the ping time varies from 90 to 150 ms. It is not fantastic but fast enough and in common level.
Free dedicated IP addresses are another big advantage. Dedicated IPs are very useful in SEO. In addition, IXWebHosting provides 1 – 3 free domains, as long as you use its web hosting service.
3. Cons
The FTP servers are not friendly to resume uploading. Because the FTP server does not support the REST command, the FTP client must overwrite the whole file. And the FTP connections are limited to 32. That means, all users on the same server share these connections when uploading. I have been refused to connect the FTP server for several times because of this limitation.
Not supporting SSH is another disadvantage. Some advance webmasters use SSH to run UNIX shell commands to complete some background tasks. Many web hosting giant companies, such as HostMonster, support SSH.
4. Conclusion
IXWebHosting is one of my recommendation in cheap web hosting market. I am impressed with the low price with powerful features and free dedicated IPs. It’s a good option for web sites and blogs with not so much traffic. Webmasters can rely on these low price plans until their web sites generate some money.