Cheap Web Hosting Blog

So here we go. Slowly, slowly catch a coupon. Today I can give you a coupon code for one of the biggest, most respected hosting providers in the US. There are many coupons for Hostgator littering the web and the problem is that most of them don’t work.

The last man/coupon standing is:

HGC25 – the name is misleading as now it only gives you a $9.94 discount on any plan. It used to be $25 at the beginning of the promotion.

But hey, every little helps! So if you want to sign up with Hostgator anyway you may as well use this coupon and save a little cash.

I noticed that a lot of companies are very resourceful at finding ever new ways of making money. There are obviously those hosting companies that lure you in through the front door with a fairly cheap flat rate and then charge you extra for everything else you could possibly want from a host. None of those sites are recommended by me. Godaddy is one of those hosts that uses its cloud as the biggest registrar to push its hosting and extract money through offering related services.

It’s become standard practice even for some of the hosts on my site to offer Adwords and Yahoo or MSN Search Marketing Vouchers for which they will bag a referral fee when they refer a client. And you can bet they refer a lot of customers. Other services may include an improved Spam Protection, site templates, Search engine submissions, or other SEO related services.

Hostgator famously caused a storm of protest in the forums earlier this year when they decided to monetize the 404 error pages accross all of its hosted sites. When you hit a 404 on a Hostgator site that doesn’t have a custom error page installed you see a Google Adsense Search box and a Google Adsense Firefox referral link. Personally, I think Hostgator didn’t do themselves any favour by trying to optimize their cash flows on the back of its users. They claim that everyone is free to create a custom 404 page but that requires a certain level of knowledge which I think you can’t necessarily expect. It’s a bit like when you live in a house on a busy street and your landlord decides to plaster the facade with billboards to make some extra cash flow.

Very recently I caught a hosting affiliate program that tried to make a little extra by including a referral link to Paypal. This will work nicely accross a big affiliate base. On the other hand affiliates are by and large pretty web savvy so they are probably more likely to have an account already.

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.

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.

Transferring from one web host to another can be quite time consuming. You need to download and upload all files from your old host to your new host. If you have dynamic content you need to import and export all your data. Nowadays some hosting firms offer to make the transfer for you if you sign up with them. Some of the hosts I reviewed are offering to make the transfer for their new customers.

HostICan will buy out your previous contract up to $40 and do the site transfer for you.

Hostgator also offers a free website transfer service.

Lunarpages does not offer to do the transfer for you but they add on up to six months of your previous hosting contract for free!! In addition they offer a 90 days money back guarantee

Hostgator is one of the fastest growing hosting companies in the industry. They recently announced that they are renting an additional 1700 in their datacenters in Dallas and Houston. You can read more about their data centers in my hostgator review. In the future you can expect to see bandwidth and storage upgrade announcements from Hostgator.

If you are looking for adult web hosting there are three good affordable web hosts who permit this content. I became aware of this while browsing various knowledge bases for other stuff. HostICan, Lunarpages, and Hostgator are among the best affordable web hosts in the business and if you want more detailed info about their plans please go to my main webhosting review site.

Hostican states that you can host anything as long as it complies with US law. You may be asked to upgrade to a dedicated server if your site uses huge bandwidth or processor capacity. I have a more detailed analysis of this host’s features in my HostICan review.

Lunarpages is another cheap web hosting firm which has no problem with hosting adult content. On their site they state:

“Yes, we do allow adult sites to be hosted here. Lunarpages has no restrictions upon content of your website as long as it is legal as defined by California law.However, adult sites that require extreme amounts of server resources and bandwidth will not be accepted.

Please thoroughly read our “Terms of Service”, http://www.lunarpages.com

We allow all kinds of adult sites except, free tgp (thumbnail gallery posts), circular pop up sites and free image galleries. Other than that, feel free to be as adult as you can be under the law of California.”

For more info on Lunarpages please read my Lunarpages hosting review.

Update: Thanks to a post in the Hostgator forum I became aware that they offer adult web hosting as well. Check their knowledge base and T&C for specifics. Make sure you go to my main site and read my Hostgator review.