HostGator - cheap top quality webhost
Hostgator is a great solution for quality hosting, designed for any pocket. It’s not really ‘budget” hosting, however, they are definitely cheap as starter plans begins with 6.95$ per month (if you pay annually in advance) and provides you with 50GB space and 200GB transfer. Yes, gigabytes. The specs are pretty impressive considering that normally you get a lot less for this price. The disadvantage of the smallest plan is that you only get 99.5% uptime guaranteed, so if you want a slighlty better server, I’d recommend to go with the “baby” plan, where you can host unlimited domains, enjoy the 99.9% uptime and get a site builder (if you need), this is for 9.95$ a month, I am sure you would agree with me - the difference isn’t that bad.
cPanel hosting with Fantastico and many pre-installed scripts, no set up fees, and all scripts supported (SQL, Python, ASP, CGI, Ruby on Rails and more). I first heard about this host from a friend of mine, who was very happy about moving his websites to HostGator. Naturally I was afraid that such a low price will come at the cost of quality, but I was wrong, the server s very stable and fast loading. I had a few issues on my very server on the first two weeks, but the support team was very quick and getting back to me each time I had a question and wanted to moan about something, so after the first few weeks I discovered how great this webhost is.
Yes, it’s great, I host Lorelei Web forum with them, but objectively looking at it, there is a disadvantages - mass mail limit. You can only send out a maximum of 200 emails per hour. If you have a bigger mailing list you need to throttle it (which is a pain in the butt, trust me). Having a big forum will prevent you from sending occasional mass emails with updates, unless you will go through all the hassle of throttling it. eCommerce websites and newsletters will have same problem, unless you upgrade to dedicated server. Problem is, you would not know about it until you actually sign up as this does not appear anywhere in the “features” pages, as it’s just a ’side policy’ that is there to prevent users from overheating the server…
Another rather annoying issue is a zero tolerance policy, which prohibits you from hosting illegal content, which means if someone reports abuse of your website and you fail to respond within 48 hours of the complain. In other words, if some moron will decide to put your site offline, all he needs to do is report you while you are away for the weekend, as when you are back you will find your account suspended with no other notes. The chances are of course very very slim, but you never know.
Then again, if you a law obeying citizen, with no email list to execute yet with heavy downloads or massive traffic, Hostgator.com will be the perfect solution for maximum Diskspace / Transfer and minimum expenses. Some of the biggest websites on the internet are hosted with them, such as good-tutorials.com and templatesmonster.com, which of course speaks in Hostgator’s favour.