Web Hosts

Look­ing for a good afford­able web host? I have reviewed what I con­sider to be the top three …..  blue­host, Host­Ga­tor and Godaddy. I want to go through a pric­ing exam­ple for each one. To keep things as even as pos­si­ble I am going to use the base pack­ages that each host offers. All prices are cur­rent as of 4/11/11. Take a closer look at the fea­tures each one offers.

Cost for One Year of Hosting

• blue­host     -  $83.40
• Host­Ga­tor  -  $75.71
• Godaddy     -  $59.87

I pre­fer Host­Ga­tor now for my host­ing needs right now. Their cus­tomer ser­vice is very good.

 

blue host

blue­host has an intro­duc­tory rate of $6.95 a month for the first 12 months ($83.40) and then it goes to $8.95 a month. ($107.40/yr.) blue­host also offers a free domain name for one year then it goes to $10/yr. The only draw back that I see with host­ing providers offer­ing a free domain name is that you do not have com­plete con­trol over your name. i.e. If you leave said host you usu­ally can not take the name with you. I do not sug­gest let­ting any com­pany have con­trol over your domain name at all. Keep in mind if you already have a name then this would not per­tain to you, how­ever they do not offer a price with­out sup­pling a domain name. Total cost for first year $83.40.

blue­host options

Unlim­ited Disk Storage	UNLIMITED
Unlim­ited Domain Hosting	UNLIMITED
Free Drag and Drop Site Builder (New!)
Free Domain Name – one year w/qualified plan	One Year
Sup­port Inter­na­tional Domain Names
POP3/POP3 Secure E-mail Support	UNLIMITED
IMAP/Secure IMAP E-mail Support	UNLIMITED
3 Dif­fer­ent Web­mail (Web Based E-mail) Solutions
For­ward­ing E-mail Accounts	UNLIMITED
E-mail Autore­spon­der	UNLIMITED
Unlim­ited GB of Site Transfer	UNLIMITED
Add-on Domains	UNLIMITED
Parked Domains	UNLIMITED
Sub­do­mains	UNLIMITED
cPanel Account Con­trol Panel
FTP Access
Web File Manager
Secure Shell (SSH) Access
Server Side Includes
Hotlink Pro­tec­tion
Over­ride .htac­cess Support
Log Files
Site Sta­tis­tics
Cus­tomiz­able Error Pages
Cus­tom Cronjobs
Spam Assasin Protection
CGI/Databases
MySQL Data­bases
Post­greSQL Databases
CGI-BIN
CGI Library
PHP 5
Sup­port for Cus­tom PHP.INI Files
Perl 5
Python
Ruby/Ruby on Rails
MySQL 5 Data­base Server
Post­greSQL Data­base Server
Javascript Sup­port
DHTML Sup­port
Flash Sup­port
Shock­wave Support
Sim­ple­Scripts 1-Click Script Installs
Free Web­site Scripts
Mes­sage Forum (PHPBB and More)
Form-mail Scripts
Social Net­work­ing Scripts
Blog Sup­port (Word­Press, b2evolution, …)
Mail­ing Lists
Image Gal­leries (Cop­per­mine and more)
Poll and Sur­vey Software
Moo­dle
Tiki­wiki
Dru­pal
Joomla
Project Man­age­ment Scripts
Help Center/Support Ticket Scripts
E-Commerce Fea­tures
SSL Secure Server
OS Com­merce Shop­ping Cart
Agora Shop­ping Cart
Cube Cart Shop­ping Cart
Zen Cart Shop­ping Cart
Free Gen­er­ated Certificate
Pass­word Pro­tected Directories
OpenPGP/GPG Encryp­tion
Mul­ti­me­dia Features
Stream­ing Video Support
Stream­ing Audio Support
Real Audio and Video Support
MIDI File Support
Add Cus­tom MIME Types
World Class Technology
Dual Quad Proces­sor Per­for­mance Servers
UPS Power Backup
Diesel Gen­er­a­tor Backup Power
Linux Oper­at­ing System
Cus­tomized Apache Web Server
24/7 Net­work Monitoring
Cour­tesy Site Backups
Mul­ti­ple 10 Giga­bit Eth­er­net Connections
Google® AdWords® Credit	$75.00
Search Engine Submission

 

Host Gator

Host­Ga­tor is offer­ing a 20% dis­count at $5.56 a month for the first year ($66.72). If there are no spe­cials when it comes time to renew then it is $6.67 a month. ($80.06) They do not offer any domain name ser­vices cur­rently. A name at Domain.com is $8.99/yr. Total cost for first year if you choose to use Domain.com for your domain name your total cost would be $75.71.

Host­Ga­tor options

Disk Space	UNLIMITED
Band­width	UNLIMITED
Site Builder
24×7 Sup­port
Instant Back­ups
No Con­tract!
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
45 Day Money Back Guarantee
Google® AdWords® Credit	$100 Credit
Free / Instant Setup
» Domain / FTP Features
Sub Domains	UNLIMITED
FTP Accounts	UNLIMITED
» Sup­ported Web Host­ing Features
Word­Press Hosting
MySQL Data­bases	UNLIMITED
CGI
Fast CGI
PHP 5
Ruby On Rails
SSH
Perl
Python
SSI
Cron
Front­Page
Curl
GD 2
Image Mag­ick
Stream­ing Audio/Video
Free Mod­ule Installation
» E-mail Host­ing
POP3 Accounts	UNLIMITED
Web Mail
E-mail Alias
Auto Respon­ders
Mail­ing Lists
Catch Alls
Spam Assas­sin
Mail For­ward­ing
IMAP Sup­port
SMTP
» Con­trol Panel Features
Lat­est cPanel
Fan­tas­tico
Soho­launch
Hotlink Pro­tec­tion
IP Deny Manager
Cus­tom Error Pages
Instant Blogs
Instant Por­tals
Instant PHP­nuke
Instant Forums
Instant Guest­book
Instant Counter
Instant For­m­Mail
Redi­rect URL
Web Based File Manager
PW Pro­tected Directories
php­MyAd­min
» Web­site / Ftp Statistics
AWStats (Real Time Updates)
Webal­izer
Raw Log Manager
Refer­rer Logs
Error Logs
» E-Commerce Fea­tures
Shared SSL
osCom­merce
Zen­Cart
Cube Cart

Go Daddy

GoDaddy offers a basic plan that cost $3.99 a month which comes out to be $47.88 a year. Their domain names cost $11.99/yr. One thing to keep in mind is that this plan does not offer unlim­ited disk space for your web site. It only has 10GB of disk space. This could be a prob­lem if your site had a pod­cast or was a pho­tog­ra­phy site. You would not have enough space. On the other hand this may be per­fectly fine for a small web­site. Total cost for a year $59.87.

GoDaddy options

Min. Pur­chase Length	3 Months
Disk Space	10 GB
Monthly Data Transfer	UNLIMITED
FTP Users	50
Email Accounts
Num­ber of Addresses	100
Total Email Storage	100 MB
Web­mail
“Light” Web­mail w/PDA
Greet­ing Cards – 290+ designs
For­ward­ing
Auto-Responder
Catch-All Email Address
Fraud, Virus & Spam Protection
Sender ID
Email pri­vacy & pro­tec­tion with 256-Bit Encryption
Data­bases
MS SQL 2008 R2	1 x 200 MB
Data­base Backup/Restore
Data­base Pub­lish­ing Wizard
MySQL	10 x 1 GB
Data­base Backup/Restore
Direct Data­base Access
Domains
DNS Man­age­ment
Access with­out “www.”
Exter­nal Domains	UNLIMITED
Sub­do­mains	25
Alias Domains	UNLIMITED
Gen­eral Features
NEW! Assign an AccountExec
SSH Access (Secure Shell)
FTP over SSL (FTPS) ‡‡‡
Raw Access Logs
Site Sta­tis­tics
24/7 Phone/Email Support
Cron Jobs
File Man­ager
Google® AdWords® Credit	$100.00
Foto­lia® Photo Credits†††	10 cred­its
Forums
Photo Gallery
Lan­guage Support
Front­page Server Ext.
Server Side Includes (SSI)
ASP
ASP.NET v4.0
ASP.NET v1.0/2.0/3.0/3.5
ASP.NET AJAX
PHP5°
MVC2^
Sil­verlight Hosting^
PHP5
Cus­tom PHP.ini/PHP5.ini
Cold­Fu­sion
FREE Pre-installed Applications
MS IE Web Controls
WSE 2.0
ASPU­pload 3.0
ASPJPEG 1.4
GUID­Maker
ASPCrypt
ImageMag­ick
Blogs
BlogEngine.NET
das­Blog
Serendip­ity
Word­Press
Com­merce Solutions
Zen­Cart
Con­tent Management
Dot­Net­Nuke 4.0
Joomla!®
Tan­dem Server New!
Forums
Vanilla Forum
YetAn­oth­er­Fo­rum
Image Gal­leries
Cop­per­mine Photo Gallery
Gallery
Admin Tools
paFileDB
Adver­tis­ing
Noah’s Clas­si­fieds
OpenX
Blogs
Geek­log
Life­type
reBlog
Serendip­ity
Word­Press
Com­merce Solutions
osCom­merce
Zen­Cart
Con­tent Management
any­In­ven­tory NEW!
Dru­pal
Joomla!®
Mambo
MODx NEW!
Moo­dle
Nucleus
Post­Nuke
Sil­ver­Stripe
Xoops
Forums
phpBB NEW!
SMF (Sim­ple Machines Forum)
Vanilla Forum
Image Gal­leries
4images
Cop­per­mine Photo Gallery
Gallery
Project Man­age­ment
Brim NEW!
dot­Pro­ject
Man­tis NEW!
php­Col­lab
PHPro­jekt
Social Net­work­ing
Elgg NEW!
Tools/Scripts
jQuery
Script.aculo.us
Web­site Add-Ons
PHC­Down­load NEW!
php­My­FAQ
php­MyVis­ites
Web­Cal­en­dar
WWW Paint Board
Wikis
Medi­aWiki
pmWiki
Other
OpenDB
OrangeHRM
phpFreeChat