Paid Web Hosting
90$ discount coupon for DreamHost.com
DreamHost is definitely the best solution if you seek a dead cheap hosting that will provide you with specs of dedicated server. The cost is 9,95$ per months, but if you sign up annually in advance, and use the coupon code “Lorelei“, you get 90$ off your deal. As a bonus for an annual sign up you get a free domain registration as well, so grand total - for $29.40 you get 12 months of hosting - 168 GB disk storage and, as unbelievable as it sounds - 1.688 TB bandwidth (1688 GB). This very blog is, by the way, hosted on Dreamhost servers.To
sum it up, $29.40 (after applying the discount coupon) divided by 12 turns to be 2,45$ per month, and for this ridiculous cost you get absolutely mind blowing amount of bandwidth, AND a top level domain of your choice, for the life of your hosting (i.e. if you prolong your hosting deal for a year more, your domain will be kept free, but don’t let this worry you, as the registration is transferable at any time, if you decide to do so). The only case in which you would need to pay for the domain is if you cancel your hosting deal before time (or / and get a money refund).
Catches? There are no catches here, really. Of course when they provide you with such a massive, dare I say - unreal massive data transfer, they don’t really expect you to use it. I should think as long as you use half of what they provide you with - you will be perfectly okay, and when you will start to use it up until the last promised megabyte, your site might crawl slower than it normally does or if all the users on the same server will collectively use up their limit, they can throw the server offline for a bit, but how fat is the chance of this happening?
The only thing you should take into account while availing of the 90$ discount, you have to pay by credit card. They would not accept paypal or any other form of payment, and more over you need to fax them (or send by airmail) an embossed with pen copy of your credit card. This was meant to prevent people from renewing their account using a discount, as should you decide to prolong the deal for the next year, you would need to pay the full price. That’s just about the inconvenience it may cause, as I remember my sign up process took longer than expected due to the credit card mess and 1 day approval.
Overall I am very very very satisfied with this webhost, they are reliable, provide a good uptime and huge resource of features. The support is excellent by all means, I always got a response and help for my ticket within 1-2 hours, which definitely is a big plus, especially if you break something and run begging the tech team to sort your issue out. Needless to mention is that for this price you really can’t go wrong.
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.
