Finding A Great Web Host

With the seemingly millions of hosting companies available, it can be a struggle to find a trustworthy and reliable host.  The truth is that almost anyone (and often 15 and 16 yr old kids) can purchase a reseller account with a large hosting company, build a pretty web site and hang up their shingle as a ‘hosting provider’.

If you spend much time on webmaster forums you can see many of these come and go.  Their only business plan is to try to be cheaper than the next guy and offer ‘unlimited storage’ and ‘unlimited bandwidth’ on which they can’t deliver.  After several months of operation they soon find their resources used up, their account slows to a crawl or goes down completely.  Customers complain and give them bad press at which point they close up shop.

We’ve used over 20 different hosting companies the last 16 years running internet businesses, owned our own servers and tried VPS and reseller accounts and just about every other combination.

Here are a few standouts:

founded in 2002, Hostgator  is one of top shared hosting companies, consistently ranked among the best by many review sites.  We’ve found their support to be excellent and extremely customer-focused.  In fact, if at any time you are not satisfied with their product you can even get to hostgator president Brent Oxley to personally get involved.

1and1 is a domain registrar and web host. They have both Windows and Linux plans available which include multiple domain hosting for less than $20 per month. 1 & 1 is a huge company with over 55,000 servers and reportedly millions of customers.  Rest assured you won’t see them close up shop on you and leaving your web site in the dust.

iPowerWeb offers Unix and Windows based shared website hosting solutions as well as dedicated servers hosting in their four world-class quality Tier 1 Internet Data Centers that are optimized to provide an industry-leading web, data, and applications hosting environment.  Although you’ll find some older reviews that are less than satisfactory, they are one of the cheaper options so you need to understand the service may be a little slower.  We’ve not had any issue with them.

How Do You Choose?

If you have only one web site and can afford the service provided by Hostgator you really can’t go wrong with them.   For multiple sites on a single account we would recommend 1&1.  And if you just want a cheap hosting account to play with choose iPowerWeb.