First of all, lets talk about what Hostgator can offer you and at what price it can offer you what you need. It terms of features, Hostgator never disappoints, as Hostgator can offer you pretty any type of service you are looking for. With over 5 million registered domains, Hostgator is definitely a top choice when it comes to hosting providers, as the immensity of the number of domains stands as solid proof for the quality of Hostgator’s hosting services.

But why should you choose Hostgator instead of another large hosting service provider? Well, the main reason and the thing Hostgator does best is cPanel hosting. The cPanel hosting they offer is only 3.96$ a month and it is beyond any doubt amazing. If you are not a computer science graduate, but you still want to be able to manage your website with great ease, then you should most definitely opt for Hostgator’s cPanel hosting package. And for the amazingly low price of just 3.96$ a month, you can’t really complain.

Even if you require a little more and if you need much more than just the basics, Hostgator is still an incredible hosting service provider. From dedicated servces to VPS and even reseller hosting plans, you can get anything you can possibly want from Hostgator and all that for an insanely low price. For just 3.96$ per month, you also get unlimited subdomains, super cheap domain registration, more FTP and email account than you could ever need and the best possible support for your hosting service. This is the best side of Hostgator. Whenever you require professional assistance with everything related to hosting your website, you can easily and quickly get it for free from Hostgator’s Support Team, as the team is world renowned from its speedy and highly proficient service.

With Hostgator, you can opt for three major shared hosting plans. The basic plan is the best plan for single domain hosting and the best for the average website. The baby plan is suitable for unlimited domain hosting and for website owners in need of multiple domains for different purposes. On the other hand, if you are the onwer of an online store, then you can always opt for Hostgator’s business package, which is specifically designed to suit all the needs of an online store owner. The business package also includes a free SSL certificate along with HTTPS encription. You can also opt for Linux or Windows hosting and you can also opt for a dedicated server. Hostgator’s cPanel is powered by the award winning Fantastico engine, which will make your life a lot easier. Managing, updating and greatly improving your website will be easier than ever before, thanks to Fantastico.

One other great advantage is you can even get all your money back, with Hostagor’s 45 day money back guarantee plan. The plan is available for free and comes with any type of package, so rest assured that you are going to get all your money back in the event that you are not satisfied with the hosting services provided by Hostgator. If you want to sum up Hostgator in one sentence, you can say that Hostgator is an amazing and incredibly cheap hosting service provider that is definitely worth it! If you are looking for high quality and highly affordable services, Hostgator is without a doubt your best bet!

InMotion is a very good and highly reliable hosting service provider, but before you actually choose it as your hosting service provider, it is in your best interest to find out if it offers everything you need and if it fits your budget. InMotion is world renowned for the quality and reliabilty of its services and it is also widely known as the best solution for businesses. InMotion has been around for ten long years, which makes it one of the oldest and “most experienced” hosting service providers in the world. 10 years of being in the business speak for themselves.

InMotion uses cutting edge hosting technology to provide customers with an unmatched super high quality experience. Price-wise, InMotion is definitely not the cheapest but it’s not the most expensive also. For just 8.95$ per month you can get unlimited traffic and disk space and unlimited subdomains. Probably the best thing about InMotion is the 90 day money back guarantee policy, which means that if you are not happy with InMotion, you can still get your money back and choose another hosting service provider, but this is highly unlikely to happen.

In terms of customer support, InMotion is probably one of the best choices for any business. Their customer support is probably the fastest service around. If you are experiencing any issues at all with your hosting service provided by InMotion, their support team will reply to any of your queries in a record amount of time and you will never need to contact them again. They will sort you out from the very first time, regardless of what your problem is. InMotion’s shared hosting plan is undoubtedly ideal for any business website. With 99.9% uptime, excellent support, amazing cPanel that includes all the features you can possibly need, InMotion ise one of the top choices when it comes to business website hosting.

However, if you are the owner of an advanced web application that requires a lot of resources to function properly, it is probably in your best interest to go for InMotion’s dedicated hosting services. This is probably the only major downside of InMotion. If your website is extremely large and requires a lot of resources, you might even get suspended for excessive CPU usage and this is why you should go for dedicated hosting instead. The truth is that any hosting provider will suspend you for “excessive CPU usage”, but InMotion will do that really fast, just because their system is better optimized and quickly detects problems, including excessive usage of CPU.

If you are new to web design and if you are not exactly well versed in computers and progamming, the premium web site builder included even in the cheapest InMotion hosting package will come in extremely handy. Building a website will be incredibly easy and straightforward even for the least experienced computer users. The email accounts included in the hosting package also benefit from a highly advanced SPAM blocking service, which is an amazing feature, especially for businesses.

Overalll, InMotion is a highly reliable, highly professional and incredibly affordable hosting service provider that offers you all the features and services you can possibly need for your website. If you want something really good and really cheap for your business, then InMotion is the perfect choice for you.

In all fairness, you should know that you can opt for completely free WordPress hosting, with WordPress.org, Blogger, TypePad, and many other popular free WordPress hosting providers. But don’t expect too much. In fact, don’t expect your free hosting package to even cover the basic requirements, because, just any other free solution, it won’t offer you what you need. If you want your WordPress powered website or blog to be even remotely professional, then you will require a professional WordPress hosting solution. But don’t let the word professional mislead you into thinking that you will have to pay a lot of money for your professional WordPress hosting package, as this is completely false.

The best WordPress hosting packages suitable for any small to medium business and even to some large businesses cost around as low as 5$ a month, which is, you have to admit, a more than reasonable price. The first and most important thing that you have to take into account when it comes to selecting a certain hosting package or provider is compatibility. In order for WordPress to properly function, your hosting package will need to meet the WordPress standards. This concerns the version of PHP, MySQL and the presence of Apache Rewrite. However, many popular hosting service providers offer WordPress hosting, which translates into a hosting package designed to be perfectly suitable for the use of WordPress.

Besides meeting these basic and mandatory requirements, your WordPress hosting package should also offer you a number of other features, such as an automated script installer and a great cPanel. An automated script/CMS installer will help you install WordPress on your hosting package within just minutes and without having to know any programming. Using an automated CMS installer is incredibly straightforward and intuitive. With just a few clicks of the mouse, you will be able to get your WordPress website/blog up and running within just minutes.

As far as WordPress hosting packages go, probably the best and also the cheapest package available on the market is offered by Hostgator. If you want to get the absolute best WordPress hosting package and if you want to pay only 4.95$ per month for it, then Hostgator is without a doubt just what you are looking for. If you opt for Hostgator’s WordPress hosting package, you can rest assured that you have made the right choice for you and for your WordPress powered website. For only 4.95$ per month, you will benefit from 24/7 support, 99.99% uptime, unlimited monthly traffic and disk space, unlimited bandwidth and MySQL databases, and last, but most definitely not least, from a 1 Click WordPress Install feature powered by the award winning Fantastico script auto-installer. Thanks to Hostgator and Fantastico, setting up your own WordPress website can be done in just a few minutes for the price of just 4.95$ per month.

While it is true that there are many other WordPress hosting packages available on the online market, it is also true that the best possible WordPress hosting package is offered by Hostgator. If you are looking for the absolute best choice, there is no reason to look any further than Hostgator.

There is one thing you should know about Fat Cow before going any further. Fat Cow’s web hosting services are especially suitable for small to medium businesses, so if you are the owner or represent a large business in need of highly advanced web hosting services, it is in your best interest to start looking for a better web hosting service provider. Fat Cow is the incredibly cheap solution for web hosting, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a bad choice. Fat Cow is without a doubt one of the best providers when it comes to small to medium businesses, so do keep reading if that is what you are looking for.

For only 3.67$ a month with a 12 moths contract you get to benefit from a multitude of amazing features, including, but not limited to unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited add-on domains, a free site builder, unlimited email accounts and much more. One of the things that makes Fat Cow incredibly reliable is their more than 13 years of being in the business. Being around this incredibly competitive market since 1998 is a thing any hosting service provider could brag about, so don’t be tempted to think that Fat Cow is just an average web hosting service provider that is not really worth your attention, or money for that matter.

While it might not be the optimum solution for a really large business, Fat Cow remains one of the top choices for small to medium businesses, and for only 3.67$ a month, it is not hard to figure out why. For one of the lowest, if not the lowest price on the market, you get basically anything you can possibly want for your business’ web application. They even back up your data for you and you can restore from automatic back ups in case something ever goes wrong. This feature is incredibly uncommon in budget hosting, so if you want something really good and really cheap, Fat Cow is the way to do it.

And it doesn’t even stop here. Fat Cow even offers a very powerful and easy to use cPanel, with which you can easily manage your website without being required to know any programming language. Full CMS support and advanced auto-installer scripts are also there to make your web hosting experience even smoother and easier. And in the event that you are not satisfied with their services, you can even claim your money back within 30 days.

Need assistance? Well, nothing to worry about there. Thanks to Fat Cow’s highly recommended, highly efficient and super fast 24/7 Support Team, you can easily get all the help you can possibly require for free within just a matter of minutes.

If all you need is a great budget hosting package, there is probably no reason you should look any further than Fat Cow. You will get the best value for your money and you will get all you can possibly need for an unbelievably low price. As far as budget hosting goes, Fat Cow is without a doubt one of the best web hosting providers.

Even if you are a heavily experienced programmer or web master which doesn’t actually need a cPanel, it is still easier to look for cPanel hosting services, as a cPanel will speed up many of the things you would be forced do to manually on a hosting without a good cPanel.

If you don’t even know what a cPanel is in the first place, here is a brief and straightforward definition that should help you understand exactly what it is and how it can make your life a lot easier. A cPanel is essentially a graphical user interface designed to help you with setting up your hosting package, website and with managing your website.

Here are just some of the things you can do with the help of the average cPanel without being required to have any programming skills at all: transferring files from any computer to your website, creating and managing FTP and email accounts, setting up, managing and backing up databases, gaining access to advanced traffic statistics, generating advanced and comprehensive error logs and even admin logs. There are pretty much the basic things that you can do with a cPanel, but it definitely doesn’t stop here. With a great cPanel hosting package, you can also benefit from script auto-installers which will help you install WordPress, Joomla or any other popular CMS within minutes, you can even generate XML sitemaps, edit .htaccess files and many other things.

So the bottom line here is that no matter how large and complex of a website you need, a cPanel hosting package will make your life 10 times easier and it will save you a huge amount of time. With a great cPanel, you can even benefit from a free website builder or designer, which saves you a lot of time and money. Once you have acknowledged that you do indeed require a cPanel hosting package, it is time to decide how much you want to spend.

For small to medium businesses which don’t require highly advanced and really powerful hosting packages, the best cPanel hosting packages are around 5$ per month, which is more than reasonable. The most popular and perhaps the best providers you should opt for are BlueHost, Fat Cow, Hostgator and InMotion. It is true that there are virtually thousands of hosting service providers, each claiming to be the best, but years of experience, quality services and great reviews truly make Fat Cow, BlueHost, Hostgator and InMotion stand out of all others.

With Fat Cow, you can get an amazing hosting package, suitable for any small to medium business, for as low as 3.67$ per month. This is probably one of the cheapest cPanel hosting packages in the world, but it also provides the best possible value for your money and it is without a doubt one of the top cPanel hosting packages. From Fantastico script auto-installers to unlimited diskspace and monthly traffic, you name it they have it and it is only 3.67$ per month.

BlueHost offers pretty much the same thing as Fat Cow, but the price is 6.95$. The advantage is that you will also get a great SSL certificate with the basic BlueHost package. Hostgator’s basic package includes everything you can possibly need and it is available from 3.96$ per month with a 3 year contract or for 5.56$ for a 12 months contract. InMotion is also an excellent choice. For just 5.99$ a month you can even sign up for the business package, which is suitable even for a large business.

The first thing you should know about BlueHost is that it is a very good service provider, but you shouldn’t go for it unless you are completely sure that it offers everything you need. In what concerns features BlueHost is definitely a very good hosting service provider, due to the fact that it offers a comprehensive range of features, which include all the basics you can possibly need, but sadly nothing beyond the most common basics. If you are in need of highly advanced features and server configuration, then perhaps BlueHost is not your best choice. If you want to make the best decision, go through all the features. The best part of BlueHost is that it will offer you unlimited bandwidth and disk space, unlimited add-ons and parked domains. The package also includes unlimited sub-domains and an incredible 1000 FTP accounts and 2500 email accounts, which is pretty much a lot more than most people could ever need.

This makes BlueHost an amazing an incredibly cheap hosting service provider, as you are about to find out. There is one thing which makes BlueHost stand out of all other provides. The monthly price for BlueHost is 6.99$, regardless of the length of the contract you sign up for. Whether it is 3 months, 12 months, 24 months or 36 months, you will still have to pay 6.99$. This can be either good or bad, depending on how you look at it. If you are sure that BlueHost is just what you need, then you probably want to sign up for a long contract and pay a smaller price.

If you just want to try BlueHost for three months and extend your contract if it turns out that you do not like BlueHost, then the constant price works in your best interest. The downside is that the minimum contract length is 6.99$, which means that even if you find out that BlueHost is not what you need, you will still have to pay for three months. Nonetheless, 6.99$ per month is without a doubt an incredibly competitive price, given all the features BlueHost offers.

Also, 6.99$ is all you have to pay. This price is inclusive of all taxes and set up fees. Furthermore, you even get a FREE domain when you sign up for a contract, regardless of the length of the contract you sign up for. There are also many other impressive bonus features that BlueHost offers. You probably know just how hard it is to get through the legal terms of a website. Well, with BlueHost, things are formulated in a very easy to understand manner, so no more legal terminology.

And when it comes to its cPanel, BlueHost doesn’t come short at all. With Fantastico, managing your website, databases, registration, installed scripts or CMSs is easier than ever before. Fantastico also comes with full support for Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Magento and other major CMSs installation, so it would take you less than a few minutes to jump start a website. All the scripts are up-to-date and working properly at all times. But just it case you need any help, you should know that BlueHost Support is incredibly fast, helpful and reliable so never hesitate to contact them, should you require any assistance.

To sum it all up in one sentence, BlueHost is without a doubt the perfect choice for any webmaster in need of a great, reliable and incredibly cheap hosting service provider.

However, judging what a “Good Price” is for web hosting is very difficult indeed. For example, you can get a website hosted for free, but that may not suit many users due to a lack of features.

Let’s take a look at some of these features and see what prices are currently out there.

Host-Space

Just like a home PC, disk space is important when considering how much data you can store. A few shared hosts now offer “unlimited disk space”. However, some well known hosts offer between 150GB – 300GB. All things being equal the “Unlimited hosts” are a much better deal.

Data Transfer / Bandwidth

In order to get your site working on the internet you will need to transfer some files. Likewise, the people viewing your site (page views) will impact upon the bandwidth of your shared server. If you have embedded videos or flash applications, band width becomes even more of a priority.

Some of the larger web hosts only offer 1.5 Terra-bytes (TB) of Bandwidth. It’s difficult working out how much bandwidth you actually need. If you’re running your school’s football website then it’s probably not a lot. If however, you’re planning for a lot of traffic viewing out-of-the-ordinary webpages, then “Unlimited” is a great deal for you with no need to get a calculator out.

Two hosts that offer both unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth are HostGator and JustHost.

At Host Gator, the cost of hosting has recently been cut by 20% so you can go “unlimited” from just $3.96 a month.

Over at Just Host they too realize the importance of a great price. They have slashed the price of hosting from a regular $6.95 to just $2.95 a month.

Unlimited + Free Domains

Being able to list a number of domains on your hosting plan is a great way to spread the cost per website. You only need to pay one fee and have everything supported under one virtual roof. This will allow you to fully maximize the other features (like disk space and bandwidth) the web host is providing.

Also, if the web host is offering a “free domain” then this is approximately a saving of $10 a year for you.

Blue Host is one such host that offers unlimited domains. Blue Host’s packages start at just $6.95 a month and a free domain name is included too!

Good Support

The level of support a host provides is another way they can add value to your subscription. If something goes wrong web host support should be the first port of call. They should do their best to fix it. If it can’t be fixed you might have to hire an expensive contractor to do it. “Prevention is better than cure” so web hosts who provide tutorials and a well-manned phone support function offer a great benefit.

One such host is InMotion Hosting. Inmotion Hosting have toll-free, U.S based phone support and a wealth of flash tutorials. Inmotion’s “Business Class” hosting starts at just $5.95 a month.

Green Issues

It’s hard to put a price on the environment but web hosts are now starting to realize green issues are good for business.

One such host is Fatcow. They offset 100% of their power consumption with wind power. This led the EPA to inaugurate them into their “Green Power Leadership Club”. All customers who take out hosting with them will have a choice of 9 “Green Badges” to display on their websites.

FatCow have realized that prices are important too and have just reduced their yearly hosting package from $99 a year to just $78!

www.justhost.com

Justhost.com is an award-winning host that’s been in business for about 5 years. Right now they are really starting to make a name for themselves. At the moment they have an amazing special offer – hosting for just $1.95 a month! The price is right but what about Just Host as a hosting company? Let’s investigate further…

Free Advertising Spend

Well, you’d expect the bare minimum for the price. When you take a look at their website you’ll realize that this is not the case. What really catches my eye is that there is no limit to how much disk space you can use or how much bandwidth either. They also offer 1 free domain which also saves you money. If that wasn’t enough there’s a $30 free Google Ad Credit with the “JustPlan” and $50 with “JustPlan Extra”. You also get 3 free domains with the “extra” plan which is great value seeing as the price is only $6.99 a month.

Well Supported

Just Host offer worldwide support in 5 key areas – USA, UK, Europe, Australia and Singapore. The average “hold-time” for phone support is stated as just 3 minutes which is very good.

Speaking of the level of support they also have a well-staffed “Live Chat” feature as well as the standard support tickets and knowledge base. E-mail response times are given as just 20 minutes and in my experience I’d say that was a first-class service.

Money -Back Guarantee

Should this not be enough they offer a full money-back guarantee. As a victim of an unscrupulous host before I read the small print closely. I was pleased to see that justhost.com offer a “no quibble” money back guarantee. They will also offer a refund for the remainder of your subscription. This is excellent and something not offered by every host (though it should be).

Users with existing websites will be extremely pleased to hear website transfers are also well supported. If you transfer a website you will still get the free advertising tokens and bonuses that new websites receive.

cPanel Feature

I was also pleased to see that Just Host offers the cPanel as a standard feature. cPanel is the number one admin tool. Once you use it it’s easy to see why. Everything is nicely laid out and there’s a helpful “Start-up” wizard to guide you. I prefer to jump straight in and I found thing’s like creating email addresses, changing passwords and making back-ups of the database all to be extremely straight-forward. I am told that cPanel also pleases expert users as it has good functionality with the “Fantisco” add on. This contains the popular applications Joomla, Tikiwiki and Moodle.

I found that in the “Knowledge Base” of justhost.com there was a whole section devoted to cPanel. In my experience cPanel is so easy to use I rarely need to seek help for regular use but the level of support on the website is impressive.

In conclusion, I think justhost.com offers a truly completive price and good support that should appeal in particular to newer domain owners. With free advertising, free domains and unlimited disk space they seem to have all the bases covered.

Let’s take a look at a few ways webhosts provide technical service and support.

Live – Chat

Live chat is the ability to get immediate answers to queries and is usually available through the webhost’s main page. The quality of support varies. One way you can judge this by how long they take to “join the chat”. The better webhosts also have the sections clearly defined like “domain support”, “email support”, “billing” etc, etc. Hosts that are not as good just have a “Sales representative” available 24/7 with the technical side of things supported infrequently throughout the day.

Phone Support

Phone support is really useful when something major goes wrong that takes your website off the internet. It’s times like this when you want to be reassured by a human that everything is not lost.

Some things to watch out for with phone support is how much does it cost to call them? Is it toll free? Do they have representatives in your country / region? What are their hours? How long does it take for them to answer and to get through to somebody who can help you?

Support-Tickets

Support tickets are another way webhosts provide support. You might get an immediate answer with live chat but Support-tickets allow you to copy and paste important parts of data (such as SSL Keys) and for you to store and review it at your leisure.

Again, the various departments / problems should be broken out and the form should ask you the level of urgency. The key factor here is response time and it’s refreshing that some hosts will let you know they have your ticket and are working on the problem.

Knowledge Bases + Forums

“Knowledge bases” are a collection of many “F.A.Q” articles which come in incredibly helpful. Often you can search in there for a quick answer without having to contact the host and wait for a resolution

Forums are goldmines of information. Quite often other users have had the same problem and post up what they did to resolve it. Webhost forums are a great idea because some things (like the installed scripts) are specific to that webhost only. So something that worked for somebody on another host might not necessarily work for you. 

Webhosts that provide all the above

You would think that all the services listed above are pretty standard. However, there is a lot of difference in the levels of support provided – particularly if you purchased webhosting from a re-seller.

Here’s a few websites that have won a few awards between them for their 1^st class customer service:

www.justhost.com

Just Host have a full range of support services spanning phone, email, live chat and knowledge base. What’s really cool is that the “Help center” includes video tutorials too! Currently a special offer is running reducing shared hosting from $6.95 to just $2.95 a month!

www.hostgator.com

Host Gator has toll free North American Phone support and all the above support options. They also have video tutorials and a well-used forum. Hosting starts from just $3.96 a month and currently new customers are eligible for an amazing $100 in Google adwords credit.

www.bluehost.com

Blue Host also provide North American toll free phone support. They have a comprehensive “Help center” and I like the “Most Popular Help Content” panel being easy to find. At just $6.95 a month they are well worth checking out.

http://www.inmotionhosting.com

Inmotion hosting takes support seriously and each operative has 4 years of experience with managers having 11.  They also have a toll-free number and comprehensive “Help Center”. Inmotion hosting have recently reduced their “Business Class” hosting to just $5.99 a month.

http://www.fatcow.com

FatCow offer North American phone support, live chat, support tickets and a knowledge base with an easy to use search tool.  They have a promotion running at the moment which cuts yearly shared hosting from $99 to just $78!

Currently Bluehost are the 10^th largest webhosting in the world and one of the top two fastest growing. Company Founder Matt Heaton is the man behind their success and he isn’t finished yet…

CEO Matt Heaton

Matt Heaton worked his way up to become President and Founder of Bluehost.com.

When he was just 21 he opened his first computer hardware store (Computer Warehouse). By the age of 23 he had opened 3 stores with around 35 employees. He also got married at this time (he is now the proud father of 5 Children).

By 26 he decided to cash in on the Computer Stores and to concentrate on his side project – web statistics software. After this became a success he started a business offering free hosting. From there the business grew and now besides being the CEO of Bluehost he also runs hostmonster.com and fastdomain.com.

Away from work Matt is a nationally ranked Table Tennis player. His last published ranking was 1650 but he has serious designs on breaking the 1800 barrier.

At work Matt has launched a serious of technological innovations that are sure to bring more success to Bluehost. Chief among them is “Hosting Resource Protection”.

Hosting Resource Protection

It is common on other shared hosts for a single user with a rogue application to affect all the other customers on the shared server. This usually meant slower speeds and service disruption for everybody.

With HRP customers are shielded from other customers who intentionally or unintentionally drain CPU, memory or disk I / O operations. This enables Bluehost to offer VPS-like benefits at shared hosting prices. They are one of the few (perhaps only!) webhosts in the world to do this. Matt Heaton is extremely pleased with the likely competitive advantage that this will bring.

Well Placed “Entry level” Hosting

If you compare Blue Host to the other big players in the hosting industry they come out very well indeed. One of the big draws at the moment for Bluehost is the offering of unlimited disk space and file transfers – even on their $6.99 hosting plan.

They also offer unlimited domain hosting so you can really take advantage of this deal. This is something that not all domain hosts offer.

Bluehost is also offering 100 mysql databases. That is far above most hosts who tend to offer a maximum of 50.

If that wasn’t enough, they’re also outdoing the competition by giving away $75 of Google advertising spend.

With entry level pricing set at just $6.99 a month and with Matt’s track record for success the smart money would be on bluehosting.com taking the coveted prize of “Fastest Growing Webhost” before too long…

In the mean time you can keep track of Matt’s Ping Pong progress and the latest Bluehost innovations at his blog http://www.mattheaton.com.