Cheap Web Hosting Blog

One of the elementary jobs in researching and writing a decent web hosting review is to perform a “sucks search query” on your favourite search engines and see what comes up. Here’s the good news – I did this for you.

Google’s number one hit for HostICan sucks is the hosticansucks.com website which is owned by Hostican. Other than that there are two results from the HostIcan forum which can’t be accessed anymore. The remaining entries are complaints about other hosts that “suck” including a recommendation for HostIcan.

So, you can see the search engine results confirm that HostICan is a good and reliable web host.

Most of the time good web hosts have good forums. Lunarpages is exemplary for this rule. Before you sign up you can go to their pre-sales section and ask any questions you may have. In the pre-sales forum you will get assistance from both members and moderators. Beginners can turn to the forum for “Beginners Assistance” and there is an extensive collection of How tos. The Advanced assistance and coding sections are both filled to the brim with expert advice on how you can get the most out of Lunarpages’ hosting environment.

The Lunarpages forum is busy and well moderated. People there are friendly and knowledgeable. One of the hallmarks of a great forum with good content is that there are many tutorials about some of the most popular free scripts either written by fellow webmasters or Lunarpages admin staff. If you need a host with a great user community Lunarpages is very hard to beat.

This review of bluehost’s forum complements the bluehost review on my site. The bluehost forum is just a user to user forum. At the beginning when Bluehost launched this forum technical admins like the mail expert Rando would come in and provide some advice but now it’s strictly a user to user forum. Once in a while you would even see the founder Matt Heaton reply to threads but I haven’t seen him there for ages. Bluehost can afford to keep it’s admins out of the forum because they have on of the best email support I know.

In addition the forum has a friendly, open atmosphere where you can always get a quick answer from other more experienced users. A couple of users I would want to mention in particular are EarlyOut, Falcon4, Felgall, and Basil. I’ve probably forgotten to mention quite a few helpful peeps. By the way the off topic forum is slowly but surely becoming a rubbish tip for SPAM and they are not doing anything about it which is pretty annoying. Apart from that the forum is a great help.

This review complements my Hostgator Review. Once you’re signed up it’s a plus if you can get good support from admins and fellow members. Hostgator is a pretty relaxed forum as you can add a signature and as long as it’s not Spam you can post links to your own site. They even have a forum for site promotion. For prospective customers the pre-sales forum is a good starting point and you can read through some of the reviews in the review forum to get a better overall impression of Hostgator.

The forum itself is reasonably busy and the users are pretty expert so you will get answers to complicated problems. In addition the Hostgator staff is very willing to help. There is also a forum for Hostgator resellers which is an added bonus.

Powweb‘s forum has a lot of posts and is very well structured. There are a couple of different mods like Doc C, IanS, and CrocHunter. The forum is rather strict as you have to get about 30 posts under your belt before you can add a signature and sometimes posts are deleted without warning. In addition a reputation system with points is implemented at this forum. For new customers there is a heplful pre-sales section where you can ask any questions you may have left before sign up

By and large, there is a very constructive and knowledgeable crowd present and you will get replies to your questions pretty quickly. One member who is always pretty willing to give newbies a hand is Yvette.

Go to Powweb

One of the ways in which I choose the web hosts hosted on this cheap web hosting review site are the hosting provider’s very own customer support forums. Many of these hosting forums are busy member to member places where you can ask pre-sales questions and general hosting queries. There are some that are virtually dead and not worth going to. A hosting forum should be reasonably busy, have knowledgeable members willing to help and it doesn’t hurt when there’s a friendly atmosphere. You don’t to be told to RTFM (read the fucking manual) every time you ask a question.

I will review particular forums in detail in the coming weeks but for the meantime here is a list of hosts that have good web hosting forums considering all the above points: Bluehost, Hostgator, Hostmonster, Lunarpages, and Powweb.

Bluehost‘s recent upgrade was a pretty substantial increase on many fronts. Bandwidth and storage both went up by 40% and domains and ftp accounts were increased to unlimited. As a long time Bluehost customer who has been a customer of other web hosts I know that usually the plan you buy is the plan you will stay on.

At Bluehost they are very happy to retroactively upgrade your account for you when you email support. So you never get stuck with a plan at signup time, Bluehost will always upgrade it´s customers to the newer plans.

Go to Bluehost

All of the webhosts I reviewed are award winners in different categories. HostIcan‘s latest accolade is a perfect score by Real Metrics for the category of shared hosting. HostIcan’s performance was measured on the basis of support response time, web speed, uptime and peak uptime. One of the reasons that made me create this site is the fact that nowadays webhosting providers like HostIcan offer a supperior business grade service at an affordable price.

Go to HostIcan

There is a very handy plugin written by Mark Jaquith that allows you to redirect to www. with a convenient wordpress plugin. Many people including myself set up their blog and then realise later that it´s set up to ignore the www. Obviously, if you´re really slow (like me) you only realise once you´ve got quite a few incoming links.

Mark´s plugin ensures that your blog pages don’t lose page rank and that you will get a clean 301 redirect which is search engine friendly and will make the Googlebot rejoice.

In an earlier post I already gave you the plain .htaccess method for enforcing www.

At the moment I´m also looking into a PHP method to achieve the same goal with headers but that is still being tested. I´ll keep you posted.

P.s. When you are messing around with .htaccess and you delete your directives and the redirection still seems to persist you need to clear your browser cache! Took me a whole day to figure this out…

Lunarpages now has an option to move to the new CPanel Evolution XP. For this purpose Lunarpages have set up a special server. Initially it is supposed to be a test server for foreign language customers who want to trial this CPanel skin. But I know that you can request to be moved to this server even if you’re an English speaker. Just email support and ask to be moved with your primary domain name and the last 4 digits of your credit card that Lunarpages has on file for you.

Go to Lunarpages.

Hostmonster uses the new CPanel evolution XP skin which is very well structured and easy to use. As the name suggests the layout of this skin follows the design of the MS XP user interface. The icons and grouping of certain categories in the CPanel make this a very user friendly CPanel design. Hostmonster users have many queries in the forums but I have rarely seen somebody complain about the layout of the CPanel.

Above you can see what the CPanel Evolution skin looks like. It supports 21 languages, tooltips, startup tips and more.

Go to Hostmonster or read my Hostmonster review first.

Yesterday another member at Bluehost asked me to test their download/site speed by downloading a 15 mb .wma file from his site. The download achieved an average speed of 140 kb/s (kilo byte per second) which is quite fast. My Internet connection is a 6 Mbit DSL line so it may be slower for other users with lower bandwidth deals.

For more info on bluehost’s speed and all other features please read my bluehost review or go to bluehost directly.

Crazy Egg is a revolutionary new web stats software that allows its users to track various aspects of your site and offers a wholly new visualisation of the traffic on your website. Lunarpages customers get a free trial of Crazy eggs web stats. Here is what you can do with crazy egg.

Create a test setup:

Lists – An overview of the all the clicks on your site

Heatmap – Where are your visitors clicking? Take a look at the heatmap.

Overlay – An exact overview of clicks and percentages of total clicks and where they occur on your site.

Blocking – Block your own IP and localhost

Automatic Archiving

RSS and email notifications – you can keep yourself updated about the activity on your site.

In this test version of Crazy Egg you can only track up to 6000 hits and 4 pages. Mind you that there are sites that create more or less hits. Although I don´t know how the tracking of Crazy Egg works exactly, a hit is usually caused by every file that is loaded on your server. I.e. if your page at Lunarpages contains 10 javascripts, and 8 pictures for your site design and another 2 in your page body you will get 20 hits with every page view!

I’m just warning you that you might burn those 6000 hits rather quickly if you have one of those sites. If this is the case I suggest you better get proper tracking of your most important page to get a bigger sample set. Check out my Lunarpages review and take a look at their hosting plans here to see what else you get with this award winning host.