BEST WEB HOSTS (2009)

iPowerWeb.com

Currently hosting over 700,000 websites, iPowerWeb certainly holds a key position in the Hosting Market. But does it really stand up to it, or it is a major stroke of luck? Read ahead to find out!

Features:
Unlike many other hosts you might have come across, iPowerWeb does not offer unlimited bandwidth/databases/ftp accounts etc for each of their plans. They do offer them in their Business Plan which you shall learn about in a while. They also proffer a Web Site creator which has some very accommodating inbuilt features for anyone lacking coding skills, shopping cart software with a bundle of features, helpful tutorials at successful internet money making and a total of $75 Google and Yahoo credits. And that’s not it! There is a hell lot more for you to check out on their Features page here. iPowerWeb is embedded with the best set of features we have come across so far.

Plans & Pricing
For what iPowerWeb.com has to offer, what they charge is very little. Although the Basic plan is decently priced, the Business plan is just simply fabulously priced. The price difference is practically nothing in assessment to the divergence in the features offered.

As you can see there, you must register for at least 3 months. Most of all is just absolutely vividly priced.

Customer Support & Reliability
iPowerWeb.com offers brilliant customer support service. You can contact them by calling, emailing or getting into a Live Chat. We tried the later two, and were pretty impressed. Quick and spot-on replies were the highlight of the communication. iPowerWeb.com is as steadfast as it gets. Although a few users in the past have reported of their data getting deleted etc., it turns out they were the ones mostly at fault. With server monitoring on a daily basis along with rapid backups, iPowerWeb can’t possibly mess it up for you.

Overview:
Features:5/5
Plans & Pricing: 5/5
Customer Service & reliability: 4.5/5
Overall: 5/5[Phenomenal]

With one of the preeminent feature sets and pricing we have ever come across, iPowerWeb really shows it has what it takes to fire 700,000 live websites on the internet, and how well!

LunarPages.com began way back in the late 90s, when the competition and clients were few and far nothing like it is today with most every one making web sites that need web hosting. And many fly by night hosting companies creating nightmares for many webmasters.The fact that this company has been in business for over 10 years says alot! Has LunarHost picked up from where it started? read on to find out!

Features:
When it comes to features, LunarPages has a phenomenal range to offer. They offer unlimited Disk space, Bandwidth, MySQL Databases, Email Accounts and Add on/Sub/Parked Domains, even in their basic plan. Besides that they also have a decently built control panel (not cPanel if you’re wondering). LunarPages.com does not offer Fantastico, but does not make the customer feel the lack of it either. It can help you install various important scripts like Wordpress,Ruby on Rails 6, MySQL 5, PHP 5, Python, JSP, ASP effortlessly. They also offer you a free domain name for the first term of your hosting plan.

Plans & Pricing
LunarPages basically offers 2 plans, The Basic Hosting plan, costing roughly $5, and the Business Hosting plan, costing roughly $22. Both the plans seem well priced at the features offered, tho you can get started for as low as $2.95 per month with the starter plan. Lunar Pages also offers eMail hosting @ $1 per month

Customer Service & Reliability
Now this is where the things are a little different, LunarPages has no LiveChat, like majority of the competing Web Hosting Companies. Instead, they have toll free phone support and instant email support with a “15 minute maximum response time” feature, which basically means you can email them for your queries for a near instant reply. We mailed them with our query and the response time was approximately 4 minutes, now that’s pretty quick.and also, it was pretty much right to-the-point with all questions answered in full detail. As far as reliability goes, LunarPages has been making changes ever since it came into this industry, and it has always been for the good. Although, checking from the customers’ experiences with the reliability of LunarPages.com has been mixed, there is still a degree of doubt over whether it is bad at all anymore, considering the bad experiences were captured a good while back you will not find a web host that has not had a unsatisfied customer  tho some may think otherwise.

Overview:
Features: 4/5
Plans & Pricing: 4/5
Customer Service & Reliability: 3.5/5.
Overall: 3.5/5 [Recommended].

With the quality of making solid changes time and time again, backing of a great support service and having the potential to retain 99.9% uptime rate, LunarPages is certainly one of our recommendations!

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!

Host Monster
During the year 2007, Host Monster wasn’t a very reputed WebHost, with their servers failing to keep up, and a bad customer service, not much was expected of them. But have they proven the odds wrong and picked up in actuality? Read further to find out!

Features:
Host Monster provides limitless bandwidth, disk space, addon/parked/sub domains and data transfer. Along with that, they also provide 100 mySQL and Postgre databases, a decent Website builder for those with lack of sufficient coding skills, cPanel and Fantastico.
HostMonster has a modified cPanel, which appears rather neat. They also offer 1 free domain name, If you choose to transfer it away though you will need to pay a one time $10 fee to transfer it to another company. It’s free as long as you’re hosted with HostMonster. This sounds a bit shady in nature, and quite frankly it is. They also offer shopping cart program, poll/survey program, support for streaming videos and various scripts for effortless installation. The customer also gets $50 google credits and search engine submission facility.

Plans and Pricing:
3 months: $69.85 (this includes a $30 one time set up fee and $10 annual domain name registration fee)
6 months: $99.70 (this includes a $30 one time set up fee and $10 annual domain name registration fee)
1 year: $83.40 (no set up fee and 1 free domain name is included) which equals to $6.95 a month
2 years: $142.80 (no set up fee and 1 free domain name is included) which equals to $5.95 a month
3 years: $214.20 (no set up fee and 1 free domain name is included) which equals to $5.95 a month
And all the prices include the same hosting features as seen here:
***Keep in mind everything is paid up front. They don’t do any monthly payments.
***Also keep in mind 1, 2 and 3 years are promotions that are currently running.
As you can see, the minimum registration time they offer happens to be 3 months, which is a not-so-major drawback.
Also, for the 3/6 month plans you must pay a set up fee, which appears reasonably high to us. Otherwise the 1/2/3 year plans are priced decently. Overall though we would say HostMonster is a bit overpriced.

Customer Service & Liability
The customer service seems pretty good as for now. While trying out their live chat, we received pretty quick responses and precise as well. Although HostMonster has suffered from Customer Service issues in the past, it seems to us they have gotten over that phase now, considering the email reply was just as swift and spot-on. That being held, time for the vaguely bad part. Their server has had issues in the past, and till date it continues to have them, although much lesser than the older days. If you wish to host a website with extremely high traffic and data/bandwidth usage, you might want to go through the options again.

Overview:
Features: 4.5/5
Plans and Pricing: 2.5/5
Customer Service & Reliability: 3/5
Overall: 3.5/5. [Decent]

Taking an overall look, Host Monster provides decent hosting services at slightly steep rates and placidly shady terms and conditions, but they undoubtedly seem to be getting better at what they do. Not really recommended if you wish to play big on the Internet, but for small-scale purposes, this might just turn out to be a fine option. Sign Up Now!.

FatCow

Features:

FatCow Plan
Fatcow makes a strong statement to embark on, by offering unlimited Disk Space, Bandwidth, Email Accounts, Databases and Add on/Sub/Parked Domains. Along with that they also provide a Website Builder which was quite impressive, a program to set up an online cartPowerplay and Shared SSL). They also allow the customer to (supporting major credit cards, renew their domains automatically (provided your credit card information is known to them forehand), point their domains and change the registrar. These features act as a chief plus point for FatCow over many other web hosts preset on the internet. They also take Server backups on a daily basis, which ensures the fact that your data with FatCow is secured. Fatcow also provides wordpress, Galley2, phpBB, Joomla and 2gb of Carbonite Online backup. The one downside here would be the fact that FatCow neither has cPanel nor Fantastico, meaning if you happen to be a novice, you will have to struggle through the tedious process of installing other scripts.
With this plan they also offer a free domain name.

MiniMoo Plan
FatCow has fundamentally offered this plan for those who haven’t yet begun with their Website and would like to show a custom “coming soon” or “For Sale”  page. It also offers some crucial features including Newsletter management, WebMail (1 account provided), a ‘coming soon’ page etc. This package is great for selling your domain etc. At only $5 per year its very afforadable!

Plans and Pricing
Currently FatCow.com offers 2 plans, the FatCow plan costing $66/year, and the mini moo plan costing $5/year. Considering FatCow regularly provides various discounts and offers, it would be advisable to keep a watch at their feature pages (Here). The prices at FatCow happen to be pretty low, but they come at a cost of lack of cPanel and Fantastico. Also you must register for 1 year at minimum, which also is one of their few drawbacks.

Customer Service & Reliability
This is where things loosen up a bit as fat as FatCow’s Professionalism goes. We contacted their Live Support 3 times, where we had to approximately wait for 2-3 minutes before we were connected to the Sales/Tech person. It took them roughly 2-3 minutes again, to reply to our queries, which many a times were not the answers we required, or were incomplete. This acts as a major drawback as far as FatCow’s steadfastness is concerned. One thing though, that we noticed was that there were relatively very few complaints from the customers with FatCow web hosting, as we have seen with other web hosting services.

Overview

Features: 4/5
Plans & Pricing: 3.5/5
Customer Service & Reliability :3/5
Overall Score: 3.5/5. [Recommended]

In one piece, FatCow provide some solid features along with decent pricing and extremely high reliability, but with the condition of registering for 1 year at least, devoid of cPanel, Fantastico and a high-quality customer care service.

BlueHost

Features:

Bluehost offers decent features, including cPanel and Fantastico. We had a good experience while using it, considering cPanel was fairly fast and Fantastico could effortlessly install Wordpress etc. They also provide unlimited diskspace, and unlimited bandwidth with each plan they offer, along with unlimited addon domains, sub domains and parked domains, which acts as a plus point over many other hosts. They also provide 100 databases each for MySQL and Postgre, 1000 FTP accounts and 2500 email accounts, which is in most cases much more than adequate. We were surprised to notice the fact that BlueHost did not offer unlimited ftp/email accounts as well, which would have acted as an advantage from a practical point of view.

Also, lately BlueHost has also been providing

• Free Domain Name

• Site Promotion Package

• Free eCommerce/Cart

• Free Blog, Forum, Board

• Top Notch 24/7 Support

• $25 Free Yahoo Credits

• $50 Free Google Credits

Although, with terms and conditions implicated.

They also had a nice website builder as an add on which is pretty good for any novice with a lack of sufficient coding skills.

Plans and Pricing

It was rather difficult to find their detailed pricing list, so we had to ask for it from the Support Staff. Upon inquiring about their latest pricing details, this is what we were provided:

Best Value: 36 Month Account $6.95 a month

* 1 FREE Domain Registration good for the life of your hosting package.
* No set up fees [$30 Savings]
* Less than $0.23 (23 cents) a day!
* $250.20 Total due at sign-up; [36 month account x $6.95 mo.]

24 Month Account $7.95 a month

* 1 FREE Domain Registration good for the life of your hosting package.
* No set up fees [$30 Savings]
* Less than $0.27 (27 cents) a day!
* $190.80 Total due at sign-up; [24 month account x $7.95 mo.]

12 Month Account: $8.95 a month

* 1 FREE Domain Registration good for the life of your hosting package.
* No set up fee [$30 Savings]
* Less than $0.30 (30 cents) a day!
* $107.40 Total due at sign-up; [12 month account x $8.95 mo.]

6 Month Account: $99.70

* $9.95 A Month
* [+] $30 One Time Set Up Fee
* [+] $10 Annual Domain Registration Fee
* $99.70 Total due at sign-up [6 mo. x $9.95 mo.($59.70) + $30 Setup + $10 Registration]

3 Month Account: $69.85

* $9.95 A Month
* [+] $30 One Time Set Up Fee
* [+] $10 Annual Domain Registration Fee
* $69.85 Total due at sign-up [3 mo. x $9.95 mo.($29.85) + $30 Setup + $10 Registration]

Optional Features After Sign Up

* Additional Domain Names = $10.00 each year
* Dedicated IP = $30.00 each year [$2.50 mo.]
* SSL Certificates = $45.00 each year
* Expired Account Reactivations = $30.00
* Postini Mail Filtering = $1.00/mo per e-mail address [prorated]

(Note: 3 and 6 month plans are not offered with the free Domain or setup)

Their prices seem extremely good as compared to the prices that are offered by other web hosts. But it comes with a string attached; you must pay upfront for at least 3 months. BlueHost accepts all major Credit Cards (visa, masterCard, americanexpress, discover), paypal, checks (U.S. Only) and money orders, so paying them should not be a trouble at all.

Customer Service

Bluehost until a few years back, had a very reputed Customer Service, but since 2007 or so it has seen a downfall. Many customers have come up with their questions being unanswered, not being notified about updates taking place and various other serious/non-serious things. Although as you might have already read, BlueHost does claim having a Top Notch Customer Service, yet due to the troubles that people have come up with, it acts as one of their weak points.

[excerpt]
Upon asking BlueHost about the complaints that users have had with their customer support, this was the reply we had:

chenderson [12:42:28 PM]: We are rated very high on customer service… We have been a a front runner in the hosting industry for over 10 years. We have set the industry standard for customer support and reliability. We offer 24/7 support via phones, live chat. or e-mail. Our support staff is well trained and very knowledgeable. The best thing is they are all in the US. They are also employed directly by us we do not contract out to call centers. When you call in you are speaking directly with a member of our highly trained staff. We are always upgrading our hosting package features. We started out offering 5gb of storage and we are now offering unlimited storage and file transfer. We own and operate our own data center. We are not a reseller like many of our competitors. We build all of our servers in house using only top quality parts. We have a staff of admins that monitor the servers 24/7 even on holidays. Our pricing for what we offer is the lowest in the industry.

This showed us that BlueHost has sound understanding of their products and services they proffer. Read further to find out whether they live up to their claims or not!

Overall

Features: 3.5/5
Plans and Pricing: 5/5
Customer Service: 2.5/5
Overall Score: 2.75/5. [Decent]

Having an overall look, Bluehost offers decent features at exceptional prices, but has a below-average customer care service and comes with a few awkward terms and conditions.

WebHostingPad Provides quality web hosting with professional service!
With a hosting plan to fit almost any webmasters or webstarters needs
With a state of the art data center with constant updates for the most secure up to date servers and software.Free Site builder software, Free easy back up solutions. and Award winning customer service and technical support

For as low as $2.99 per month cPanel
With unlimited features like disk/storage space bandwidth/transfer , Domains, data bases, email, subdomains,  See Package Details!

JustHost is just a great first class shared hosting provider with a 99.9% uptime and a anytime money back guarantee they make sure to keep you happy!
With the “Just Plan” you get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and all the unlimited web hosting features you will need including the ability to host unlimited domains! and 1 FREE domain for life with the “Just Plan” or 3 FREE domains for life with the “Just Plan Premium” and  as a bonus you will also receive $75 in Advertising credits to promote your site(s)

All hosting accounts use the world famous cPanel
Just Host is committed to making web hosting simple and understandable for any and every one from the 1st time user to the seasoned expert!
With 24/7 human technical support
So if you looking to start your own blog, message board, or host a professional website for you business / company JustHost can make the job much easier for you !
Use this coupon code for 20% off your order JHSL20

inmotionHosting ★★★★★has been a industry leader since 2001
they offer many hosting options!
You can go all out and get your own dedicated server starting at $199. or
start with a virtual private servers better known as VPS starting at $39.95
immotionhosting also offers Business class hosting with exclusive speed zone technology for fast and stable web hosting starting at $6.95pm or you can start out with a personal plan starting at only $3 per month this is perfect for a new or smaller site and upgrade when needed!
With cPanel control panel option for a familiar more efficient web server management environment!
with options like unlimited disk space and bandwidth lots of tools like web site builders and on click installers of scripts like wordpress phpbb joomla and lots lots more withe the use a fantastico plus (offered on most cpanel host)

inmotionHosting.com is a cNet certified and approved by the Bureau of Better Business for added assurance!
Offering Free Who Is Privacy protection on all accounts and you even get to pick your data center location for faster server response time. and a 99.9% server up time guarantee! What more do you need!

Please Post your review or feedback below!
Thanks