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GoDaddy Reseller Trial Closed (sort of)

Paul Zannucci — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:41:52 +0000

Okay, so you may have followed my trial of GoDaddy’s reseller product, as I was updating periodically on how the attempt was going. It was an expensive trial, and one that I completely flubbed. Below you will find what I did, what I didn’t do, and how I may try to tackle it again with a new marketing plan.

After spending $199 for an annual reseller account, I did absolutely nothing with it. Well, that isn’t quite true. I tried to pick a name that people would search for occasionally. I ran some ads on Live, Google and Facebook; but as it turns out, that is very close to doing absolutely nothing. What I can say about the GoDaddy reseller plan with absolute confidence is that if all you are going to do is run a few sidebar ads here or there and come up with a searchable name, then you aren’t going to get anywhere. You’ll make no money at all.

That’s what I did, and I got less than 50 visits to the site in an entire year, and no one bought anything. Don’t do that. You are wasting your money.

Since canceling out the account, I’ve actually put a little more thought into it, though, and there may be ways we can get this to work (I say “we” because I am assuming you are interested in possibly opening an account and making some money). We’ll divide my thoughts into a couple of different topics.

Site Name: Don’t do what I did. I selected ushosts.us. I selected this because after checking Google’s keyword search tool I found that people were apparently looking for U.S. based hosting companies by using the keywords “us hosts.” In retrospect, people using that search phrase may have been looking for women who work the world’s oldest profession (oops), but it didn’t really matter because Google never let me come up anyway. After a full year, you could type in my site name exactly and never see my site. Why? Likely for a few very good reasons, which we’ll get into next.

Search Engine Marketing: Running ads on search engines didn’t work for me. Why? Partly because I was so cheap. I wasn’t willing to pay $7 per hit to get my ad up front for good searches, so I never got any business. Why wasn’t I willing to do that? Well, perhaps my math was wrong, but if only a small percentage of people who clicked on those ads bought, but I paid $7 every time the ads were clicked on, I would have gone broke pretty quickly. The break even on such a thing would have been years given the relatively low prices I was offering.

So, if search engine ads don’t work for me (because I’m either too cheap or too confused), what is left? Well, that would be may favorite sort of marketing, the free kind. This is where you get yourself to show up in search engines without spending any money on it. But after a year I still wasn’t showing up in search engines? How could that be? It’s pretty simple, really.

See, everyone in the world who has a GoDaddy reseller account has the same, more or less, site up. That means when Google goes to index your site, all it sees is a site that looks exactly like a thousand other sites it already knows about. You see, with the GoDaddy design interface, you can’t really change your site enough to make it distinguished from other GoDaddy reseller sites. This is a real problem if you are trying to get free search engine hits. So what is the solution?

The Solution: So far as I can tell, the best way to work this would be to purchase two identical domain names, one with a .com and one with a .net suffix. Use the .net as your GoDaddy site, where all the GoDaddy software is put, etc. and then create your own site with the .com address that has your own website that you can design and manage any way you like. This .com address is the site you are now able to market and try to get onto search engines, using all the usual tricks to get decent traffic (see my series on generating web traffic).

Will this work? Well, I said that this site wouldn’t be afraid to put up its money to attempt to avoid you having to waste yours, so I’m going to give it a shot.

I’ll be much more responsive this time and give you the blow-by-blow details as they occur. This trial will start either in late August or early September.

Meanwhile, if you are feeling particularly inspired and want to try it yourself, please follow the link below. By purchasing from links on this site, you help to pay for all these web hosting trials, and you can’t get a better price anywhere else anyway.

POW Web Trial End: Final Review

Paul Zannucci — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:51:45 +0000

I have just completed my one-year trial of POW Web. The trial included purchasing domains and running three sites on my account, two of which ran on the blog platform wordpress. The busiest site, one of the blogs, ran cron jobs and received a high of 100 unique visitors per day. One site was a message board site that was somewhat under utilized, with the busiest day logging around 50 new comments/threads. I did not attempt any ecommerce, but given my findings from the other sites, this was hardly necessary.

I could do an itemized final review and list what POW Web does well along with what it doesn’t do well, but that would only serve to obscure the most important thing you need to know, which is that running a site on POW Web is a bad thing.

What you quickly discover is that site performance is extraordinarily erratic even with static pages and no traffic. I cannot tell you how many times I was the only person on a site, particularly during setup, when the servers would just spin their wheels trying to deliver a 20kb page. Needless to say, raise the level of processing complexity and add a bit of traffic and you will soon feel as though it is 1995 and you are trying to download a page of high-res photos on a first generation phone modem. Furthermore, sites tended to lose contact with their databases at various times throughout the day.

So in the end, for POW Web the question really doesn’t come down to a matter of checking off a list of positives versus negatives because the simple act of serving up web pages is simply too much for them, and so there you go; the inability to perform the most basic function you need from a web host pretty much rules them out.

I have closed all accounts with this company and would need some very compelling reasons to give them another try. If you are looking for good shared hosting, I would recommend anyone else so long as they are a reputable company with solid business practices. Specifically, though, I would recommend HostGator, my choice for best shared hosting.

Pronet Hosting Review

Paul Zannucci — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:25:41 +0000

Until the end of July 2009, Pronet Hosting is offering a pretty amazing deal. If you click the banner above, you can get a full year of hosting for $4.95.

Consider this a preliminary review. I’ve only been with Pronet Hosting for about a week, as of July 19, 2009, so this review may be subject to change. I sped the process up a little because of the current hosting sale they are running. So far, I’m really surprised at how happy I am with them. I’m not the easiest webmaster to please. However, it should be noted that my test site only has an empty shell, WordPress installation running. Still, I’ve seen some hosting companies who couldn’t even handle that properly.

Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am usually a tough grader. Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★☆
Pricing:	★★★★★
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★½
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★☆
Power Rating:	★★★★¼
Customer Service:	★★★☆☆
Ease of Use:	★★★★¾
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★☆

Pronet Hosting offers both Windows and Linux shared hosting solutions, dedicated servers and a reseller plan. According to the “terms of service,” you aren’t allowed to use “extremely high amount of server resources” or you will be contacted to pay additional fees. To the uninitiated, this probably sounds a little vague and harsh, but while I won’t argue about the vagary, I’ll argue that this is a very positive, and unusually good, response to sites that use too many resources. Many shared hosting companies just shut you down. At Pronet Hosting, they seem willing to work with you. And this creates added scalability. Either you pay more or you can go to their dedicated servers, which are well-managed and reasonably priced. Overall, I would say this is very solid. You have a chance to start on the cheap and move up if you ever need to. Can’t beat that.

Pricing: ★★★★½

If I were only rating their prices as of right now, their pricing can’t be beat. At $4.95 per year for their least expensive plan, you aren’t going to be able to find better than that no matter how hard you try. Once the sale is over, I assume that their pricing will go back to $4.95 for the lowest priced plan, on up to $99 for their dedicated servers. Considering the price to value quotient and class of hosting, I would say that Pronet Hosting offers a very reasonable price.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★½

I have only been with Pronet for about a week (as of July 19, 2009), so I can’t give any more than the simplest estimate here, but I will say that their servers seem to be well designed and very responsive. I’m running a dynamic WordPress site there and the speed has been consistently exceptional, even when factoring in the very low traffic loads. Some shared hosts start slow, not Pronet. As of yet, my site hasn’t gone down, and they offer a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★☆

I give them a higher rating than your average shared hosting company because of their seeming willingness to work with you on your server usage and the availability of dedicated servers. Again, I will have to come back and address this issue more knowledgably as I continue to use them.

Power Rating: ★★★★¼

Because of the speed of their servers and the availability of the dedicated servers, Pronet Hosting comes in very well here. The vast majority of websites could not outgrow Pronet Hosting.

Customer Service: ★★★☆☆

I had made a mental note that I was going to give their customer service a 1 star out of 5. After all, you don’t have the option to call them, which will drive some users crazy, but after trying their ticket customer service, I have to say that I was pleased with the result, and that is what is most important.

Essentially, I created a ticket at 4:36 pm on a Sunday afternoon, labeling it as “low priority,” and I recieved a knowledgeable response in under half-an-hour. For me, this kind of customer service is great. I’d rather submit a ticket and get a good response back in half-an-hour than to call a phone number and get someone who is clueless, but you do need to be aware that calling clueless people is not an option with Pronet Hosting.

Ease of Use: ★★★★¾

cPanel with Fantastico De Luxe is as easy as it gets. You can easily install, to the root directory, over 50 popular software platforms, from blogging and forum software to ecommerce and photo gallery solutions. The only thing you don’t get is FTP within the cPanel, but that is easily handled by downloading a free program like Filezilla. If you are going to run your own site, you need to be able to run FTP programs, anyway, and Filezilla makes it easy enough for nearly everyone. They also offer instant backup and restore, which is a great feature, and a number of other nice touches.

Overall: ★★★★¼

I’m shocked, really. I’m such a grumpy hosting user that I was certain this company, because of the cost, would drive me batty. I’ve already, after all, skewered Bluehost and PowWeb. How could I like a much smaller hosting company like Pronet Hosting? Well, they are working hard to create a great solution and seem to be pulling it off, that’s how. Very, very good so far.

You can’t get a better price anywhere. If this honest review was helpful to you and you are interested in more information, please click below to take a look at Pronet Hosting:

GoDaddy Reseller Review

Paul Zannucci — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:58:03 +0000

Click below to see the specifics from GoDaddy’s reseller program:

Overview: So here’s the deal. I never really expected to run this test, but from looking at my statistics, there are a lot of people interested in becoming resellers. I’m not one of them, but as I looked over the reseller program at GoDaddy, I decided that it was worth a good look. For one thing, I could do it for $199, which is a solid price for such a thing, and also it is very easy to use, so it won’t take up too much of my already strained time.

Here’s another deal, though. Because of my contract with GoDaddy, I can’t acknowledge my own site here. This is rather frustrating because it would be more helpful to you if you could go take a look, but there is a way around it, as you will see in the “Set up and Maintenance” section.

Also, I’ve had to develop a new rating system that is more appropriate to being a reseller. I should point out, however, that I DO NOT intend to try any other reseller programs at this time, so this is comparing GoDaddy to my expectations rather than to other programs.

Reseller Plans:	★★★★★
Pricing:	★★★★★
Set up and Maintenance:	★★★★★
Product Selection:	★★★★☆
Consumer Pricing:	★★★★½
Client Customer Service:	★★★★★
Marketing and Earnings Potential:	☆☆☆☆☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Reseller Plans: ★★★★★

There’s really not more you could want here. The basic reseller plan is $99.99 per year and might include everything you need. What you don’t get on this plan is the ability to sell your own reseller plans, “the best buy rates in the industry,” and earning PPC money off of clients’ parked domains. I’m not sure what “the best buy rates in the industry” means, but at the time that I was setting up my account, I assumed that meant I would get better pricing with a higher priced plan, so I picked the middle plan, the Pro Reseller. With that, all I can’t do is sell reseller accounts. The cost for this middle plan is a reasonable $199.99 per year. The highest level, the Super Reseller plan, adds the ability to sell reseller services to your customers. Since it doesn’t seem to add “downstream” income to sell reseller plans, in other words, you don’t get a share of what they sell, I decided I wasn’t all that interested in it at this time. I can see that once your reselling account becomes successful, that you may want to add this ability and offer it to your customers.

Pricing: ★★★★★

GoDaddy is as inexpensive, or more so, than the other resellers I checked. One thing to note here, though, is that you can’t pay monthly, but if you are that cash strapped, you shouldn’t be getting into reseller hosting at this time. It is not a “quick fix” for money problems, and you will likely have to spend more money to make money down the road (see Marketing and Earnings Potential section).

Set up and Maintenance: ★★★★★

Not sure I’ve ever done anything as easily as I set up my account. I paid and had a site. From there, I was easily able to redirect it to a domain name that I owned, played with the colors using their design wizard, and added a custom header. Then I went through and made sure I was offering all the products I wanted to offer, and that the prices were where I wanted them. You can go in and select various sales and promotions if you like. It’s all very simple and intuitive. Maintenance is nothing unless you want to run sales and such.

So what sort of site do you get for money? Well, since I can’t link there due to the terms of the agreement, let me describe it to you. It’s easy to do. The site looks exactly like GoDaddy.com with regular models instead of celebrities. Change the colors a bit with the design wizard and add your own header, and you have a very, very professional looking site that will inspire confidence in your customers.

Consumer Product Selection: ★★★★☆

Very, very robust. Essentially, you are offering everything that GoDaddy offers with a couple of minor exceptions. Their newest products are a special WordPress hosting and grid hosting. I don’t know if you can’t offer them because they are new or if they don’t intend to ever let you offer them. I will call them later to clarify. Still, you can offer three levels of shared hosting. VPS and dedicated hosting. And you also have something called blogburst hosting. Obviously, you can sell domains, and there are a lot of add-ons that customers can purchase. It’s a full range of products that dwarfs many “one-size-fits-all” companies.

Consumer Pricing: ★★★★½

The prices your customers pay are very good. In fact, on the lowest hosting plan, you are actually cheaper, if you want to be, than GoDaddy themselves, as you are on the blogcast hosting. You won’t compete very well with GoDaddy on domains, but you can come in lower than most providers. VPS hosting starts at just $29.99 per month. Your customers are going to feel as though they are getting a good deal, and really they are.

Client Customer Service: ★★★★★

This is really sweet. You have the option to handle customer service yourself (why, oh why, would anyone ever do that?) or you can let GoDaddy do it for you. You get your own phone number so that their 24/7 support team can identify what host the customer is calling from. You can add your own logos to the support tickets. Basically, your customer gets the benefit of GoDaddy’s customer support without ever realizing they are working with GoDaddy, and you never even realize that they’ve had a problem. Most resellers leave your customers to you, but not GoDaddy. If you can think of a better solution than this, I’d like to hear about it.

Marketing and Earnings Potential: ☆☆☆☆☆

This non-rating has nothing to do with GoDaddy. I would rate all resellers the same. GoDaddy has many resellers earning 5 figures per month, but to do that isn’t easy. Pay $199 and leave and you’ll earn nothing. You are going to have to market your site, and probably not in the usual ways. This is a very crowded market. Go to Google and type in anything useful for website hosting, and you’ll see all the usual people come up. You will never surpass GoDaddy or Bluehost or HostGator, etc. in the search engines, so you have to take another path. One useful method might be to try to secure a domain name that is distinctive yet will still get traffic for hosting. For instance, if you live in Atlanta, you could use variations of AtlantaHost.com until you find one that isn’t taken.

The other thing you are probably going to have to resign yourself to, and I will post more on this as I get more experience with my reseller account, is that you may well have to pay for advertising, for instance through Google Adwords. That way, you get to put yourself at the top of search engine results, just for a price.

Done right, the earnings potential is staggering, but it won’t be easy.

Overall: ★★★★¼

I did my research and picked GoDaddy. I would have never tried this as a review topic had I not had confidence in GoDaddy and their set-up. I’ll keep you updated as I go along.

Click below to take a look at GoDaddy’s reseller program:

UPDATE: Go here for my first monthly update of how I am doing with my GoDaddy Reseller Account.

Netfirms Review

Paul Zannucci — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:50:52 +0000

Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am a tough grader. Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★½☆
Pricing:	★★★½☆
Speed and Uptime:	★★★½☆
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★☆
Power Rating:	★★★½☆
Customer Service:	★★☆☆☆
Ease of Use:	★★★☆☆
Overall:	★★★★☆

Pleast Note #2: So much has changed recently at Netfirms that I’m no longer completely comfortable with this review because I don’t have a current account with them. I will have to try them out again, but I don’t have a timetable for this. I am working with their general manager to get more specific information on how their grid works and will update on that soon.

Cick Here to Read my Q/A with Dan Kershaw of Netfirms

Overview: Netfirms is a shared and grid website hosting company. I hang out with site owners all the time and no company has as wide a range of opinions about them as Netfirms. From “the last and only host you’ll ever need” to “the most oversold host on the Internet,” the spectrum of opinions is wide and contradictory. The reality, of course, is somewhere in between and is based upon user expectations going in. Netfirms is not a super-fast grid host. The reality is that Netfirms is actually a good, mid-power choice.

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★½☆

Netfirms has three hosting plans. Ignore the cheapest one (Plus), the $4.99 per month shared plan, if all you think you will ever need is shared hosting. If $4.99 is the price range you are looking for, go somewhere that does the low-end hosting a little better, like US Hosts. However, if you are just starting out and don’t need more than shared hosting for a time, then this plan gives Netfirms some decent scalability. You can start here and then move up to the grid hosting when you need it. For new sites, that is usually a prudent plan.

The next step up is where Netfirms begins earning their pay. The “Advantage” plan includes grid service (a very good thing) and 2000 GB of transfer, more than almost anyone will ever need. You get 2 free domain names and a variety of nice extras, plus up to 30 MySQL databases. If I were starting one of my notoriously hair-brained projects at Netfirms today, this is the plan I would choose.

The biggest grid plan, netfirms business, I would ignore initially unless you are looking to transfer existing business to them and already know that you will need more than 2 TB of transfer. However, I’m not sure I would do that. Netfirms business plan, at $14.99 per month, is great as added scalability to sites already hosted by Netfirms, but sites that need that much power to begin with may be better served going to a power host. This is merely speculation, however, as I’ve never used 2 TB of transfer.

They also have “clustered” enterprise plans that start at $49.95 per month. This is where we begin to get a little cloudy and into the problems that people talk about regarding Netfirms. I’ve never used their enterprise plans, but from reading through them, one thing is abundantly clear. The purpose of the enterprise plans is not to give you more transfer, which is actually lower on these plans, but more power and speed. This is where you begin to realize that Netfirms grid isn’t what you would normally expect.

Pricing: ★★★½☆

This is a “for what you get” sort of deal: pricing compared to similar service elsewhere. Pricing is good, considering netfirms to be a grid host, so long as you don’t mind paying for 1 or 2 years at once. Monthly payments are not an option. The cost per month for the Advantage plan comes out to $9.95 for one year plus a set-up fee that brings you to $119.40 to get started. If you are willing to pay for 2 years up front (I really wouldn’t pay that far in advance unless you’ve used them before and know you are going to like them), the monthly price drops to $8.95 and your total start-up costs go to $214.80. They offer a 30 day, money-back guarantee. With the Advantage plan, you get 2 free domain names.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★½☆

This is where the arguments among website owners begin. You don’t get the consistent speed you would normally expect from a grid host. I don’t know why this is. What you do get is a strange sort of performance that isn’t always related to your site’s complexity or traffic. If you are reasonably pleased with how your site loads when no one is there, then you should also be reasonably pleased when you get a few hits. To me it was fine; for others, it wasn’t. I think it depends upon your expectations going in. You aren’t getting world-class grid for $10 per month. You are getting, well, starter-grid. It’s kind of like the difference between a Ford Focus and a Ford Mustang. They are both reliable and okay cars, but if you get into the Focus and punch the gas pedal expecting Mustang performance, you are going to be very disappointed. I got into netfirms expecting Focus performance and got what I expected.

As for reliability, they are right up there, nearing 100%. I’ve clocked it at 99.98 percent.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★☆

They don’t do “unlimited” bandwidth and storage, which is a good thing. Those companies that promise such things know that they can’t come close to delivering on those promises. Instead, the Advantage plan offers 250 GB of space and 2000 GB of transfer. That’s very good, and you may be able to get closer to actually using it here, rather than at standard, shared hosting companies. Here is the problem, though. I have tried repeatedly to pin netfirms down on how many compute cycles or CPU usage that you have, which will be the determining factor on how much bandwidth you can use, and they are unable to give me an answer. That’s not good.

Power Rating: ★★★½☆

This factor combines speed and uptime with bandwidth and storage. The highest a shared host can receive is a 3. Per their marketing material, you would expect netfirms to get a great score here, but I cannot get any solid answers from netfirms on how they regulate compute cycles, which leaves me speculating that they are very close to shared hosting here.

Customer Service: ★★☆☆☆

They have live-chat for sales customer service, though it is next to useless. The sales reps have no idea about the products they are charged with selling. In theory, they have telephone support for existing customers. Twice I tried to call their 24/7 toll free customer support line and just gave up, hanging up the phone in frustration after what seemed to be a wait without end. There was a message up at the site that they were upgrading their phone service in order to provide faster support. I have not tried to call in since then, so I don’t know if they have improved or not. You do have the option of email support, which might be okay. Some day I’ll try to call them and see if they’ve improved. I don’t know what I’ll ask since I don’t have an account there anymore; maybe, “Do you you have Prince Albert in a can?”

Ease of Use: ★★★☆☆

Unfortunately for me, they have upgraded their control panel since I used them, so I can’t speak with great accuracy here. I will say that they were pretty easy to use before, and I doubt that they’ve made it more difficult. They do have installation programs for things like WordPress, but their list of software installs is not nearly as robust as it is most places.

Overall and Bottom Line: ★★★★☆

This sounds like a less than positive review, but there is a market out there for netfirms, in my opinion. I would recommend, with a reasonable level of confidence, netfirms for a single scenario, but that scenario probably fits a lot of people. You have one or more sites, business or otherwise, and they have outgrown shared hosting, and you don’t want to pay $20 per month or more for top-tier hosting. For example, say that you have a blog that doesn’t earn money (as most don’t), and you are getting into trouble with your shared host because you are getting too much traffic. For that person, this would be a good place. You’ll get a bit of added power without forking out a ton of money. The price is going to be similar to shared hosting, but now your traffic concerns are reduced. Netfirms offers a great mid-range solution.

Click the banner for the best prices from netfirms:

Ultrahosting Review

Paul Zannucci — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:43:04 +0000

Overview: Outgrown your shared hosting? Is it time to go with VPS or dedicated managed hosting? You sound like you may want to take a look at UltraHosting because that is all they do, and they do it well. Not only that, but they set the bar for graduated scalability and pricing.

Rarely do I do reviews where I seem like a “fan” of the hosting company, but this is going to be one of them.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★★
Pricing:	★★★★★
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★★
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★★
Power Rating:	★★★★★
Customer Service:	★★★★½
Ease of Use:	★★★★☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Disclaimer:UltraHosting offers a very powerful product, but if you are a first-time website owner and don’t have a great deal of knowledge and experience, you may want to start somewhere else, like with shared hosting. That’s not to say that UltraHosting would be a poor choice. It may just be overkill.

That said, if you are confident that you have a good product and are dedicated to making it work, then you could do far worse than to begin your hosting with UltraHosting because of their flexibility, power and price-points. Unlike shared hosting companies, you will never have to worry about outgrowing UltraHosting or going bankrupt due to bandwidth overages.

If this disclaimer is scaring you, go away quickly. If not, welcome to the magical world of UltraHosting.

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★★

You can never outgrow Ultrahosting. From VPS to huge banks of servers, they can take care of anything. Among VPS and dedicated hosting companies, Ultrahosting sets the bar, and very high, for the variety of plans, flexibility and scalability they offer. The range is just about staggering, and yet it is easy enough to go through and pick exactly what you need. For instance, let’s say you want to go with VPS to begin with and plan to move up as needed, a very reasonable plan. So you click on VPS and are provided with three options, clearly explained, from $19.99 to $39.99. After you pick the option that is best for you, you go to a page that further breaks down the capabilities in this category. Select the one you need and click “configure and order.” For VPS, you simply have the option of adding extra bandwidth and additional dedicated IP addresses. Pick what you want and go from there. On dedicated plans, you have the option, once you get to the configurations pages, to select just about all features of your server.

The scalability is what is staggering here. Because of the vast options available, you can literally work your way up in a very orderly fashion from $19.99 per month to whatever you would need, taking leaps by only about $10 a month.

Aslo available are private racks, or colocation hosting and fully managed hosting.

Moving from one plan to another is a breeze, and they even help you.

Pricing: ★★★★★

From everywhere I’ve checked, and I’ve checked a lot of places, UltraHosting’s pricing leads the industry. Actually, they make such a point of it that they offer a 110% price guarantee.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★★

A lot of time, people will assume that all their hosting problems will end once they finally make the jump to VPS or dedicated hosting. Many times they are sorely disappointed. What you get at Ultrahosting, however, is what you would expect and what you are paying for. They are fast so long as you pick the right plan and put the right site on it. Because of their scalability and the number of plans that they offer, it is possible to go the wrong route and bog a very complex, traffic intensive site down. That’s not their fault; that’s your fault. Make sure you pick the right plan for your needs.

They offer a 100% uptime guarantee. I can’t imagine that they absolutely NEVER go down. Everyone goes down eventually. I tried to find out what would happen if your site went down, but couldn’t. I’m sure they would issue a credit or something.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★★

This is the rarest of rankings. Ultrahost joins Media Temple as the only site you can’t outgrow. You can literally order a 10,000 foot bank of servers, assuming you are quite wealthy. If you ever buy that 10,000 foot bank of servers, let me know. You’ll be one of the true “big boys” of the Internet, and I’ll post your picture on this site as a famous person who read this review ; )

Power Rating: ★★★★★

Yep.

Customer Service: ★★★★½

Giving out all fives on the ratings has made me grumpy, so I’m going with a 4.5 here. Plus, their live-chat is down this morning. Outside of that, you can call their toll free number. One thing to note here is that the product that Ultrahosting has is more complex than the products offered by shared hosting companies, so the level of support has increased. The people you talk to at Ultrahosting are real IT professionals, not just people answering a telephone.

Ease of Use: ★★★★½

I gave very serious consideration to this rating, and decided I would mostly compare Ultrahosting to other VPS or dedicated hosting providers. This is a different type of beast here, and you should be aware of that. VPS and dedicated hosting is not as easy as shared hosting. But Ultrahosting does their best to make the process of setting up your accounts and getting you running as easy as they can, and they really do have helpful technicians. If ease-of-use is a great concern to you because you aren’t comfortable with with the IT side of things, you should consider choosing their fully managed plan.

Overall: ★★★★¼

Obviously, I’ve very high on Ultrahosting. Uncomfortably high for me, but there is no doubting that they do this part of the market better than anyone. I can’t imagine even recommending anyone else for people who are shopping for VPS or above hosting.

Was this review helpful for you? You can’t get Ultrahosting any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link below and enter the coupon code “July09″ to save 50% on set-up and 10% on your dedicated server (VPS has no set-up fee)

Host Papa Review

Paul Zannucci — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:26:52 +0000

Overview: Host Papa is a shared host with a single hosting plan, as many companies have gone to these days. Host Papa really does most everything well, but one of the things that really distinguishes it from other hosting companies is that they have gone 100% green.

What I feel is important:

It wears me out ; ) to type this over and over again, but shared hosting does have its limitations. As soon as I get a full-fledged post up about that, I’ll link to it from all the reviews. For now, just know that shared hosting is perfectly fine for 99 percent of all websites. Complex sites or sites with major traffic may have to look to grid or dedicated hosting. This is really the only drawback that I can find with Host Papa.

Cost: You get a free domain for life, which is nice, and free set-up. Charging for set-up can catch a lot of newbies by surprise when they start with a host, so you won’t have to worry about that at Host Papa. Their pricing is very good, but doesn’t allow you to pay monthly, which can cause some people difficulties. The annual rate comes in at $6.95 per month, but if you are willing to go to 3 years, you can get that down to $4.95. They also offer a 30 day guarantee.

Speed and Uptime: Host Papa’s uptime is at 99.99%. That is world-class no matter who they are grouped with. Their SQL servers are responsive and well designed, so sites rarely go through any significant slow time. Host Papa is at or near the top of the class in both speed and uptime, even when compared to much more expensive hosts.

Want to test drive a couple of sites that are hosted by Host Papa? Here is an insanely complex site that is hosted with them: VI VAA. I find it remarkable that that sort of site can operate at all on a shared host, much less be reasonably (sort of) responsive.

For a more realistic test, visit Mafic Studios. Notice how that site, well, signs. You go from page to page without effort. This brings me back to my delayed lecture on shared hosts. With a reasonable site and a good shared host, like Host Papa or Host Gator, you can do a lot and be very happy. Go nuts with a shared host, and you are likely to be disappointed; not because of anything the host is or isn’t doing, but because you are trying to do something unreasonable with what you have bought. A Toyota Camry is a fine car, but don’t try to enter it in the Daytona 500.

Customer Service: Host Papa is also a clear front-runner in customer service. I’ve stated my preference for live chat before, and they have that, but they also have 24/7 email support and telephone support that is 24/7 Monday through Friday and most of the day on Saturday and Sunday. This is another host I’ve never had to call for customer support, so I can’t personally attest to the quality of help you receive, but most customer reviews are favorable.

Ease of Use: Again, Host Papa does it right and one-ups most of their competition. You have cPanel to control your site, which is very easy to use; Fantastico Deluxe to install software with but a click or two; and then they go one better, offering users a very robust web designer program, Soholaunch, which is worth the price of admission by itself.

Going Green: This is important to many people these days, and Host Papa jumped out in front of this problem early. They offer 100% green hosting. Does that mean that if the wind stops blowing your site will crash? Not so much. Let me allow them to explain it to you:

HostPapa has taken the initiative of going green by purchasing 100% green renewable energy to power our data center, web servers, office computers, laptops and office space. These energy sources supply HostPapa’s entire equivalent energy consumption into the power-grid with certified 100% renewable green energy sources, such as wind and solar-powered energy.

How do we do it?
We certainly do not have a wind turbine on the roof of our data center! Sure, it would be a neat thing to have, but that is not the case. After an energy audit by an outside provider to calculate our total electrical energy consumption from traditional sources, HostPapa purchased “green energy tags” or certificates from a certified green energy supplier. That supplier calculates the total energy consumption of our operation and uses their suppliers of green energy to pump in 100% equivalent energy back into the power grid. This effectively cuts down on the carbon dioxide-producing (CO2) energy that we normally would have required from non-green energy sources.

Bottom Line: Host Papa is a great selection for those whose needs match with a shared host and who can afford paying a little in advance. And if you have environmental concerns, they are THE choice as a shared host. Speed, customer service, up-time, easy to use and green. What more do you need to know?

For the best deal at Host Papa, click the banner below:

WordPress Review

Paul Zannucci — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 23:49:54 +0000

Clarification: There are two ways to use WordPress. One is through their free hosting platform at WordPress.com. The other is to install their software on your own hosting, which is generally referred to as WordPress.org. There are some limitations with what you can do at free hosted WordPress.com, which we’ll go through below. On the other hand, by installing their software on your own hosted account (most hosts have one-click installation), you can do pretty much anything you can imagine with WordPress.

So why would I consider WordPress.com, a free blogging platform, to be free web hosting? Simple. Because it is.

More than just “blogging” is capable with the WordPress software, which can handle anything from blogs to complex ecommerce sites and social networks. To be certain, there are some things you can’t do with free hosting at WordPress.com that you can do if you take the software and put it into your own, self-hosted site. But if you are looking for “free,” then you can’t be all that picky, can you? There are severe drawbacks to every free hosting package out there, but WordPress.com is different. It was meant to be free all along.

What you can do

Blog: Might as well start with the obvious. Free blogging is what WordPress.com was designed for, and for that it is fantastic. If you simply have a strong desire to express yourself, you can’t do any better than to go with a free WordPress.com account. They have a copious collection of templates to use, so that you can set your blog up just about any way you imagine. Your blog will probably be picked up rather quickly by Google, and you will also get traffic internally via WordPress.com’s great methods of distributing traffic. Not only can people search all free WordPress.com blogs, but your articles may show up under on other people’s blogs as “possibly related posts.”

Marketing: WordPress.com is a great way to market other sites you may have. They are rather particular in what you can attempt to sell there. You can’t use javascript, and you can’t push things like “get rich quick” schemes, but legitimate businesses may use the free blog to update their customers and advertise their products. You can even run honest affiliate programs from WordPress.com.

What you can’t do

WordPress.com wants to run an honest blogging/website system. Certain things are against the rules there, like running link farms and advertising suspect products. If you are looking for somewhere to push your off-shore gambling and pharmacy business, you have come to the wrong spot. Also, you can’t run scripting or things like Adsense.

Bottom Line: Looking for a handy place to host an honest site with some decent design flexibility for free? WordPress.com may just be for you. It’s a great starting place, and the flexibility of the free themes is pretty dramatic. Know a little about HTML and you can pretty much put up any type of you can imagine by setting it for a particular page to come up first, rather than your blogging entries.

If all you want to do is blog, free WordPress.com is a great spot. Even if you are just unsure of what you want to do, WordPress.com may be a great place to experiment and get your start.