There are far too many features to list them all in this review, but in addition to the features listed above, they also offer unlimited add on and parked domains, unlimited FTP accounts as well as unlimited MS SQL and MySQL databases. Do you need shell access? If so, you can obtain shell access for a mere $2.00 per month. Additional free features are; customizable error pages, online user stats, CGI –Bin and PHP, PERL and Python support. The hosting package also contains 2 types of webmail, spam protection, Microsoft® Frontpage® extensions and is Dreamweaver compatible.

LunarPages.com offers 24/7/365 support. Their support offerings also include a blog, comprised of over 20 industry experts and LunarPages.com staff, a Facebook group and a company newsletter. This newsletter consistently contains interviews with leaders in the industry, company and industry news, discount offerings and tutorials.

LunarPages.com has 4 datacenters, located in Los Angeles, CA., Riverside, CA., San Diego, CA. and Las Vegas, NV. The centers maintain 24/7/365 monitoring and management as well as having engineers on site from 8 am to 12 am PST. You can be confident that your service will not be interrupted as there is a redundant network group, Tier 1 backbones and fiber entrances, 2000 Mbit connectivity, Ddos protection and tape backup. In addition, the datacenter has climate control and a power generator in the case of an outage.

LunarPages.com has been in business for just under a decade. You don’t stay in business that long in the hosting industry unless you are ahead of the curve and your competition. Anyone looking to host a site owes it to themselves to research what this company is offering.

The hosting plan is fully MAC compatible and also supports Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Iweb and others. You receive FTP access and can host unlimited domains, as well as unlimited parked and sub domains. Do you require online statistics and reporting? No problem. The hosting package includes Analog, Webalizer, Counters, current visitor reports and sub domain statistics.

Hostpapa.com offers 24/7 email support and phone/live chat support from 6am to 10pm EST. In addition, they offer video tutorials and an extensive FAQ library. They also have a “tips and tools” section, which provides links to everything from coupon codes and discounts to customer success stories. Hostpapa.com prides themselves on superior customer service.

Hostpapa.com provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This guarantee is based on their own historical performance data, not just a number thrown out to attract customers. As is standard, they offer a 30 day money back guarantee. Their data center incorporates water detection systems, redundant climate control, dual pre-action fire suppression, uninterruptible power supply (UPS)and backup power with a dedicated diesel generator. All of Hostpapa.com equipment is powered by Intel products and a Cisco powered network.

Hostpapa.com may not offer multiple plan levels, but they don’t need to. They have made their one plan robust enough for the seasoned user and user friendly enough for the beginner. The price is more than fair and the support is second to none.

PowWeb.com does not stop with the features listed above. In addition, they provide $50.00 in Google Ad words and $25 in Yahoo search credits. The hosting platform is Ecommerce ready, provides dns management features, has 24/7 FTP access and operates on a UNIX platform.

PowWeb.com offers 24/7 email technical support, toll free telephone support and a free online chat support. PowWeb also boasts a 20,000+ Active Community Forum and provides online tutorials.

As previously mentioned PowWeb.com provides a 99.9% uptime guarantee. They realize that part of a successful website is ensuring that traffic can get to it. Therefore, they utilize a load balancing platform. The use only Dell servers and they utilize NetApp storage clusters and their RAID4 technology holds up to 30 terabytes of disk storage. They use multiple Gigabit fiber-optic connections in an effort to ensure your site will load quickly.

PowWeb.com offers small and medium size businesses critical webhosting needs at a price that even the smallest business can easily incorporate into their operating budget. They are committed to ensuring that their service is robust, reliable and they are always looking to stay ahead of the curve and offer the newest technology.

IX Webhosting offers 3 separate plans. They promote their Business Plus Plan as the best value. The fee is $6.45 per month.
In addition to the features listed above, IXwebhosting.com also provides 8 dedicated ip addresses and 2 free domain registrations with this plan. The plan is Ecommerce ready and the total mailbox quota is 5GB. IX Webhosting wants you to stay current with the market and therefore offers all of their hosting customers FREE online subscriptions to Website Magazine and Practical Ecommerce.

IXwebhosting.com utilizes a 24/7 ticketing system, toll free telephone support and a free online chat support, as is fairly common in the industry. They guarantee a response within 1 hour for ticket submissions. Their 30 day money back guarantee is a “no questions asked” policy. Should you decide to cancel outside of the 30 day window, they also guarantee a refund of that months fees. In addition to the standard customer support methods, IX Web Hosting also maintains an extensive FAQ library as well as an online “Hosting Users Manual”.

As mentioned before, the datacenter is located in Columbus, OH and IXwebhosing.com utilizes server load balancing, hotlink protection and UPS power backup/backup generator for their 750 servers. The company could not be more serious about their 99.9% uptime guarantee. This guarantee states that your site will be up at least 99.9% during a 12 month period. If they fail to meet this service level, you can submit a request for a “service credit due to an uptime concern”.

IXwebhosting.com appears to offer a robust plan at a very reasonable price. In addition to the hosting offerings, they have a multitude of additional services you can purchase, such as webdesign, marketing and you can even have them manage the moving of your site to their services. They offer one stop shopping for all of your webhosting, marketing and ecommerce needs.

In addition HostMonster.com also supplies unlimited add on, parked and subdomains as well as shell access, log files, site stats and 3 different web based email options. Have no fear if you have multimedia needs, as this plan features support for streaming audio/video, real audio/video as well as MIDI file support and flash support. Do you need E-commerce solutions? If so, this hosting plan has shopping cart options, free generated certificate, password protected directories and Open PGP/GPG encryption. Last but not least, Host Monster also provides a one click installer for blogs, shopping cart, forums, photo galleries, etc.

HostMonster.com boasts a true 24/support system. The support is not outsourced and the average phone hold time is less than 2 minutes. The support system is comprised of toll free telephone support, online ticketing system and an extensive searchable knowledgebase.

Host Monster utilizes “World Class” technology. They use a Linux operating system, Quad Processor Performance Servers and a customized Apache Web Server. They maintain UPS power backup/backup generator, courtesy site backups, OC-48 backbone connection and 24/7 monitoring.

HostMonster.com offers a user friendly plan at a market competitive price. The promotional pricing applies to terms of 24 and 36 months. With all of the features provided with the hosting plan, you are definitely getting your monies worth. There must be a reason this company consistently wins awards for their service and support.

In addition to the features above, the hosting plan also includes hosting unlimited domains, unlimited addon/parked domains, unlimited email aliases, unlimited FTP accounts, unlimited MySql databases and instant backups. As if all of this was not enough, you also have access to 4500 free web templates, flash templates, 52+ free scripts with instant script install, private SSL, 4 shopping cart options and you can purchase a dedicated ip for $2.00 per month

HostGator.com offers 24/7 customer support via online chat, phone and email. Their support is NOT outsourced. They maintain forums, flash tutorials, an in depth knowledge and a blog.

HostGator.com utilizes The Planet as their exclusive data center and network provider. They house servers in 4 of The Planets Dallas area datacenters, ranging in space from 22,000 to 78,000 square feet. Their network is a Certified Cisco Network with 10 backbone and fiber providers. The data centers are monitored 24/7 by The Planet and by HostGator.

What we have mentioned in this review is simply an overview of the offerings from HostGator. They offer so much more than could be included in this review. Their hosting package is unbelievably loaded and for the price they are charging, it is an outstanding value.

In addition to the free domain name, you can host an unlimited number of domains and there is no limit on parked or sub domains either. The package is Ecommerce enabled with a secure server. The features just keep on coming with this host. In addition to the features previously mentioned they also offer free domain privacy, free backup service, spam assassin protection, Fantastico script support and unlimited FTP access. The free site builder includes such features as photo editing and retouching and has over 100 site designs. WebHostingPad understands you need to market your site, so they offer $25.00 in Google Adword Credits, $25.00 in Yahoo credits and $50.00 in MIUA credits. If you need multimedia capabilities, they have you covered. The hosting plan supports streaming audio and video and has MIDI file support. If all of these features just doesn’t seem like enough, WebHostingPad.com offers a message board, image galleries and web blogs as bonus features.

WebHostingPad.com offers 24/7 email and toll free telephone support as well as free online chat support. They maintain an extensive online knowledge base and video tutorials. They tout a 99.9% uptime guarantee and a 30 day money back guarantee.

WebHostingPad.com has their datacenter in Torrence, CA. This center is a private N+1 facility with AC and DC raceways with 2N distribution. The facility maintains 48 hours of generator fuel and has contracts with multiple fuel vendors. Security is 24/365 and ALL doors are secured with biometric hand geometry readers.

WebHostingPad.com offers an extremely loaded hosting package for a very low price. Their commitment to their customers is unwavering. They are committed to continuing to offer industry leading service at better than competitive pricing. If you need a robust hosting package for a minimal price, you need to add WebHostingPad.com to your list of companies to consider.

Blue Host has consistently garnered high praise for its superior customer service, so there’s little wonder more and more people are turning to Blue Host for their web hosting needs. Blue Host continues to add to their evergrowing award list, adding seven awards in 2008 including: 2008 Award for Best Overall Hosting, Best Blog Hosting 2008 and Most Reliable Web Hosting. The number of awards this company earns is sure to increase, as they are truly committed to outstanding service offerings, reliability and out of this world customer service.

Blue Host uses Cpanel as the Control Panel for their customers. This is very user friendly and comes with numerous features such as: site statistics, forums and scripts. If you are unfamiliar with Cpanel, Blue Host has a live demo on their site. As a plus, customers can conveniently order a bevy of add-ons through their control panel. These add-ons include: dedicated ip address, SSL Certificates and Postini Mail filtering.

Blue Host maintains a 24/7 ticketing system, toll free telephone support and a free online chat support. In addition, the company maintains a forum with over 29,000 members. If all of this is not enough, the CEO also maintains a blog in which he regularly discusses current happenings with the company, the service offerings, etc. Blue Host’s Support Center also allows you to track current and previous trouble tickets. You can also take advantage of their extensive Knowledgebase where you’ll find valuable articles on how to use your promotional tools, Audio and Video Streaming, your control panel and tips and tricks for getting the most from your website. You can also manage your account through a button on the support page.

Blue Host is fanatical about protecting your data. They maintain an amazing data center with state of the art equipment. They use High Performance Xeon Servers and the system is monitored on a 24/7 basis. In addition, Blue Host performs mirrored storage backups in their continuing effort to safeguard your data from being lost. As mentioned earlier, they have a Network Uptime Guarantee of 99.9%.

Blue Host’s advertised pricing is for their 24 and 36 month plans. If you want a 12 month plan, the fee is $7.95 per month. Any plan less than 12 months results in significant price increases, but this is standard across the industry.

Current pricing for hosting with Fatcow.com is $66.00 per year. There is no setup fee. This appears to be a limited time offer on the pricing, as it usually runs $99.00 per year. In addition to the features previously mentioned, Fat Cow also provides ftp access, a customizable control panel and integrated Google Custom Search and Google Webmaster Tools.

Fat Cow likes to market themselves as fun and unique, but they are very serious about their commitment to their customers. They utilize a load balance platform with multi gb connections. They maintain 24/7 facility monitoring as well as perform daily server backups. If the power goes out, no need to worry as Fat Cow maintains a generator backup system. Fat Cow averages an uptime of 99.99%

Fat Cow has an extensive FAQ library as well as step-by-step tutorials. If you need assistance, FatCow support is never far away. You can reach them 24/7 via telephone, support ticket or live chat. Their commitment to stellar service is reflected in their “oath” to their customers. They commit to answer your call in under 2 minutes on average and resolve your problem on the first contact or set a firm deadline to follow up with you. They are so confident in their ability to offer top of the line customer support that they will give you a free month of hosting if they don’t deliver on their promise.

FatCow.com offers a straight forward plan at an industry leading price. They have additional features available for purchase and their customizable control panel adds to the ease of managing your account. Signing up is quick and they offer you the option of domain privatization during signup.

Why Do I Need a Domain Name?

Quite simply, you cannot have a web site without a domain name. The domain name is your sites address on the internet. You need to have a domain name in order to add your site to search engines.

What If My Domain Is Taken?

If the domain name you want is taken, you can try variations of the name, such as mydomain.com instead of domain.com, or try adding hyphens to the name, i.e. my-domain.com. You can also try different extensions, such as .net, .org, .biz. Depending on your location and if your business is localized to one region, you could use a country specific extension, such as .us, .fr, .jp, etc. This is a good option if for example you are located in France and only offer your service or product in France. Using the .fr extension readily identifies your site as France specific.

Once I Have My Domain, Then What?

Once you have registered the domain name that you want, you need to start researching web hosting service providers to determine which provider best suits your hosting needs.

How Do I Design My Website?

You can use any number of web design software programs such as DreamWeaver, CoffeeCup or WebStudio. These are just a few of the programs available for purchase. If you already know HTML, you can build your site without the use of software. You also have the option of using the site builder that is provided by your web hosting service provider.

Will I Need a Shopping Cart?

If you want to sell a product on the internet, and you want to sell it in a secure fashion (which is very important to your potential customers), then yes, you need a shopping cart. You need to look for a shopping cart that offers multiple payment options for your customers, auto responders, which allow you to automatically retain a customer/potential customers email address and secure ordering. You also need to make sure the program does not restrict how many product offerings you can have.

How Do I Get My Site Into Search Engines?

You can submit your site for free to the major search engines, or you can purchase search engine submission. The trick to getting high rankings in a search engine is ensuring the keywords appear numerous times on your pages and making the content of your site high quality. Your goal is to get other sites to link to your site. If you web site is of poor quality, it is unlikely that other websites will link to you. You need to make a list of keywords you feel pertain to your site, then research how many times those words were searched in the major search engines in the last 30 to 60 days. Once you have determined which words were searched the most, you then make sure that those words are prominent in your page and are in your title. In addition, if your service or product is limited to a city or a region, it is wise to include the city or region name in your keywords.