Top Web Hosting Lucky Seven

Are you launching a website? If so, you?ll quickly find that not all web hosting companies are created equally. Things you should look for in a provider are reliability, price, responsiveness, security and a comprehensive control panel, some even offering basic website design set-up. While most hosting companies are resellers, we looked for those with full control over their data centers. We researched several hosting services to compile a list of the Top Web Hosting Lucky Seven list.

No. 1: IX Web Hosting (www.ixwebhosting.com), in business since 1999, offers exceptional customer satisfaction rankings, fast load times and superior reliability. The company gives discounts on longer billing cycles, either quarterly, semi-annually, annually or every two years. They offer a full money-back guarantee including setup fees. The company?s uptime records are high, with overall reliability at 99.9 percent. Their data centers are complete with firewalls, leading security and CISCO state-of-the-art routers. The company uses H-Sphere technology to support their control panel, giving customers superb back-end plan management. You can add and remove domains, control email and FTP accounts, auto responders, MIME types, PHP/ASP configuration, mySQL, PostgreSQL and MMSQL databases.

No. 2: Lunar Pages (www.lunarpages.com), established in 2000, offers basic hosting plans from just $6.95 per month, which includes 400 gigabytes of data transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, e-commerce, blog, forum and photo gallery functionality. This also includes a free domain name for life plus one additional add-on domain. Their datacenter includes Dell Power Edge 2650 servers and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Servers are multi-home, connecting to premium Tier-1 Backbone providers for optimal performance. The company offers CPanel 5 back-end control for email management, password and FTP login changes plus website statistics. LunarPages also delivers outstanding technical and customer support.

No. 3: BlueHost (www.bluehost.com) in existence since 1996, offers an extensive script library including blogs, forums, calendars and portals, commerce functionality, SSL support, free domain registration, osCommerce, Spam Assassin and secure email. Their smallest plan begins at $7.95 per month and delivers 15,000 MB storage, 400 GB transfer and 2,500 emails. The company provides reliable backups, functional administration, leading-edge equipment and outstanding customer service.

No. 4: MidPhase (www.midphase.com) boasts more than 40,000 customers, all earned over just the past few years. The company offers the ideal hosting platform for small companies and individuals. They provide unmetered bandwidth on higher level plans and high bandwidth on lower plans, giving customers plenty of room to grow. Their smallest plan is just $7.95 and includes 15,000 MB storage, 500 GB transfer, unlimited emails, CPanel with Fantastico, free domain registration for life, PHP, Perl, SiteStudio and osCommerce. For larger companies, MidPhase offers shared, dedicated and Virtual Private Servers (VPS), a step in between shared and dedicated hosting plans. They have a history of reliable technical support issue resolution, with phone ticket issues resolved in just about 15 minutes on average.

No. 5: ANHosting (www.anhosting.com) was established in 2001 and has quickly risen into a multi-million dollar web hosting company with three offices in two countries. They offer 17 GB disk space, 500 GB data transfer, ten domains, free domain for life, 30-day money-back guarantee, PHP, Perl, Python, GCC, RoR, unlimited MySQL databases, Frontpage extensions, a free website builder and 24/7 phone and email support with every plan. Services begin at a low $6.95 and scales upward from there. The largest plan gives you access to the Fantastico script library, Site Studio, Agora cart, osCommerce, SpamAssasin and unlimited emails. Their support is exceptional, with a solid track record and phone ticket resolution averaging just 15 minutes.

No. 6: HostExcellence (www.hostexcellence.com), founded in 2002, offers a broad selection of hosting plans and competitive pricing. They deliver reliable services with hardly no outages. The company uses two redundant fiber-optic connections in their datacenter, using their own fiber-optic look. So uptime is not tied to telephone companies for the last mile. Host Excellence also has multiple connections to Tier1 network providers. Their customer service record is superb, offering 24/7 live chat and sales services plus online trouble ticket submission.

No. 7: Easy CGI (www.easycgi.com), delivers exceptional Windows hosting at competitive pricing. Their core foundation lies on industry-leading technology including n+1 redundancy. So should a power failure occur, a fire erupt or HVAC systems falter, the company has both primary and secondary back-up plans in place. They provide the same 24/7 support you receive from our first six providers, as well as a toll-free access number. The company offers a range of hosting plans, from an email only hosting plan, at just $3.96 per month, to their enterprise plan at $21.56 per month. Their administrative control panel provides outstanding webmail, web-based FTP, reseller tools, disk/bandwidth usage, DNS administration, WWW password protection and more.

When shopping around, consider a ten-year plan for your business. Most companies stay with the hosting provider they begin with, as switching can be complicated and cause some downtime. Our Lucky Top Seven should be an excellent start.

Seven Basic Ingredients of Unix Hosting

Though often overshadowed by the market dominated Windows and Linux platform, Unix remains a widely used platform and a popular option for web hosting.  This article will introduce you to seven features commonly found in Unix hosting plans.  Though basic, these features are very important and should not be underestimated.

1.) POP3 Email Accounts – An example of a POP3 email account would be “mailto:yourname@yoursite.comyourname@yoursite.com“.  Most hosting companies will provide you with a large number of email accounts to use for yourself or distribute to your employees.

2.) Webmail and SMTP – As soon as your website goes live, email will likely become your main source of communication.  The tool you need to make this an easy process is a webmail program such as Horde or Squirrelmail.  This process can be even faster when downloading your messages to email clients such as Microsoft Outlook or Eudora.  However, in order for this to work, you need a Unix hosting solution that supports messaging protocols such as IMAP and SMTP.

3.) Spam Filter - It doesn’t matter who you are, no email user is immune to spam messages.  In this day and age of the internet, having a reliable spam filter is a must.  These applications are installed on the web server where your site resides and typically offer features such as blacklisting, whitelisting and greylisting to mitigate spam.  The more flexible filters will allow you to make configurations to tag spam and have it delivered straight to a quarantine folder to keep it from cluttering your inbox.

4.) FTP Accounts - FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a method that allows you to upload your files and maintain them on the server.  A Unix host that supports this protocol usually provides the ability to create a certain number of FTP sub-accounts.  This allows you to provide your clients and users with access to password-protected directories, which is very useful for sharing files in a more efficient and secure manner.

5.) Backup Utility - While most web hosts perform automated backups on a regular basis, you should never put the fate of your website in their hands.  There are many ways to backup your website data, but the easiest way is with a utility specifically designed for this task.  Most of today’s control panels come included with built-in utilities that allow you to easily backup your site in minutes.

6.) Web Stats – Analyzing your visitors and traffic can play a crucial role in the success of your site.  Popular web stat software such as AwStats and Webalizer run on the back-end of the server and can provide you with detailed reports on your statistics.  This can give you the knowledge to make the needed adjustments or additions that increase traffic and boost sales.

7.) PHP and MySQL – Similar to Linux, almost all Unix plans come with support for PHP server-side programming and the MySQL database server.  These features are generally provided for no extra costs and can give you the power to create a dynamic, data-driven website.