BEST WEB HOSTS (2009)

PowWeb.com

In the face of the fact that other web hosts offering a storm of plans to their customers; PowWeb.com prefers sticking to only one. But do they really hit the bull’s eye with it?
Read on to find out!

Features:
PowWeb, despite of lacking cPanel and Fantastico, which is what many customers consider a high priority requirement, have everything one needs to have their work going. With the one and only one plan, you are offered unlimited Disk Space, bandwidth and E-Mail accounts, 75 MySQL Databases, a personally built Control Panel, which has been rated very well by the users, the ability to install and run applications like Website Builder, Shopping Cart Set-Up program and scripts like Wordpress phpBB etc. PowWeb assures you that even though you may not be able to tailor your plan very much, you shall not feel the lack of any highly important or even semi-important thing in there. The one thing good we must point out is that the features are clearly laid out and brilliantly presented, which has a lot to do with simplicity.

Plans & Pricing
As mentioned earlier, PowWeb offers only one plan, although with 3 different pricing options.

The 3 month plan costs $53.31, with $30 as the set up fee.
The 1 year plan costs $46.56 with 6 months free.
The 2 year plan costs $138.48, with a Domain Name free for 2 years.

As you might have guessed already, the pricing is pretty perplexing. We by far have not been able to figure out one reason why someone would pay more for the 3 month plan than for the 1 year plan, considering it has no benefit over the 1 year plan.

Customer Support & Reliability
This is the part where PowWeb.com suffers a little, but makes up to the highest degree for it. While contacting PowWeb.com through the Live Chat service, we had to wait for almost about 3-4 minutes, 2 times, in order to get in touch with service personnel. It was only the 3rd time that we got through, and when we did, the replies we had were pretty much NOT to the point, although at last the person talking to us, after putting us on hold a couple of times, gave us the response we needed. Now they do make up greatly for it, how? They have a support forum running, where the customers help the fellow customers get past their problems. Now this is a wonderfully marvelous initiative taken by PowWeb.com, which acts as a MAJOR plus for it, over several other WebHosts.

When it comes to the question of reliability, putting everything in one place, the answer would most definitely be YES, and a confident one. Their powerful Load Balanced Web Hosting Technology  is just another brilliant step taken by PowWeb.com.

Overview:

Features: 4.5/5
Plans & Pricing: 3/5
Customer Support & Reliability: 5/5
Overall: 4.5/5 [Highly Recommended]

Taking a look at it all, PowWeb.com is backed by solid technology, offering a simple plan with effective features and brilliant support initiatives. It was pretty hard for us to resist from giving them a full 5 as an overall score, but a few things held us back. Although their pricing options might be confusing, they certainly are the cream when it comes to WebHosts.

Host Gator
Although their website might give you an impression of a free hosting website, or just another cheap low quality reseller, HostGator claims to be one of the major threats to it’s competitors….does it really stand up to it’s claim? Read further to find out !

Features:
HostGator provides more than enough features to keep you happy.. For the majority plans, Unlimited Add on/Parked/Sub Domains (except in the basic most Shared Linux Hosting Plan) Webspace, bandwidth, Site Builder, Instant Backups and Email Accounts are offered. Also, cPanel along with Fantastico, Shopping Cart Set-up application etc is provided. All in all, it would be a severely rare case in case you found anything to be lacking as far as HostGator’s offered features go.

Plans & Pricing

Although HostGator provides just about enough features; it offers a barrage of plans, which acts as a major advantage for both their customers and them, considering, the customer gets a lot of options to choose from, as to what suits him the best. You can check out the Plans, Pricing and Features here:

Although HostGator charges a little more than many other hosts for providing the services that it does, it has a major advantage in the form of allowing it’s customers to register for whatever time period they feel like. No need to invest or commit all your budget to hosting at one time like many companies that make you sing up and pay for a whole year or 6months etc at once.

HostGator has huge market share in web hosting providing quality servers for top fortune 500 companies to hobby web masters they even offer FREE non profit web hosting for any non profit and or charitable organizations.
and if your looking for green hosting host gator has you covered with award winning green hosting they claim that all of their shared and reseller servers are wind powered 130% but that is not 100% true the servers are not actually using power generated directly by wind instead they purchase renewable energy credits = 130% of the electricity it takes to power and cool the servers! so you get stable dependable servers that dont depend on the wind to run. so its a win wind..

Customer Service & Reliability
The customer support from HostGator was first-class, when we tried it out. The responses were quick and spot on. We received a reply to our query mail pretty quickly. As compared to many other web hosts, HostGator seems to be having the best reputation as far as Customer Satisfaction goes. Taking a peek at the Reliability, we would, without a doubt recommend it even if you wish to set up a website with heavy traffic, large amount of bandwidth requirement or disk space, or wish to set up a hosting website, keeping this as a base.

Overview:

Features: 4.5/5
Plans & Pricing: 3.5/5
Customer Service & Reliability: 5/5
Overall: 4.5/5. [Highly Recommended].

HostGator does what it says, with a splendid set of features, decent pricing, brilliant customer service, reliability, and lenient terms and conditions, HostGator is easily one of our top proposal, and could in future, very well be yours too!