It seems like today everyone wants to put up some kind of a web site or blog, and wants to know which service is best for hosting their content. While this is not a comprehensive review of every provider on the web, I am going to provide my experiences with some of the big hosting companies that I have experienced. Personally, I have tried a number of services for hosting my files and domains including 1and1, DomainDiscover, GoDaddy, and HostGator. Each of these services has their pros and cons. While you can implement the most of the same features on each provider, such as hosting multiple domains and php sites with a mySql database, each service is different when it comes to reliability, service, and ease of use.

Domain Discover Review

The first domain I ever purchased was with DomainDiscover because it was recommended to my by a friend, and at the time in 2000 it was on a short list of credible services I trusted. Overall they provide a good product and it was a simple process to get my domain up and running, however it was not a simple process to make changes to the nameservers and hosting options because those features were buried in the interface. Since then, they have improved their interface greatly, however they are far from the least expensive option out there.

1and1 Review

A few years later, while I was in college, I wanted to get my first blog up and running and needed to buy another domain. Since money was tight, I simply looked for the cheapest domain hosting service possible and came across 1and1. Their service was exactly what they promised, it was cheap. In this case, it was definitely true that you get what you pay for. However, this wasn't really a big deal since the domains were cheap and I could still host them how I wanted. The biggest problem with this service was with their billing department. At some point, they stopped billing my credit card and I received no communication, email or snail mail, from them. Unfortunately, I didn't notice until they put a lock on my domain and all my visitors only saw the default hosting page instead of my blog. When I called their billing department to resolve, they said I had an outstanding charge (of less than $10 I believe) and I would need to talk to their collections department to reactivate the domain. When I called their collections department, I was told there was no lock on my domain and that they couldn't accept payment. On two separate occasions over the course of a week, I asked to speak to a manager and was hung up on. Since my blog was dead in the water, I decided to do a domain transfer to GoDaddy because of their reputation for being a domain leader online. It was during the process of trying to transfer this locked domain that I discovered all domains are intellectual property and no hosting services have no legal right to hold them from being transferred.

GoDaddy Review

Once I had transferred my blog's domain to GoDaddy, I found it fairly simple to add additional blogs and niche web sites to their service. Also, their hosting interface was extremely easy to use for the cost. It was $7.99 per month for their economy hosting service to have 150GB of storage for an unlimited amount of domains and 25 MySql databases, which I figured was a great deal considering the cost of hosting a site on my own servers, as I had done previously. Over time, I had over 10 domains and blogs hosted on GoDaddy and started to notice that more frequently my visitors were coming across a “Service Unavailable” error message. After Googling the problem, this is apparently a common issue with GoDaddy because unless you buy their more expensive Server Hosting package, that you are actually sharing capacity with other people who also pay for the service and sometimes it cannot handle the bandwidth. Lets be clear though, I only had a limited number of simple Wordpress blogs online, nothing that was too bandwidth or cpu intensive. This problem started costing my money when Google started penalizing my search ranking due to the service unavailable message. Although they are great and inexpensive at hosting domains, I didn't have the best experience with their web hosting. So, once again I needed to look for another web hosting service for my sites.

HostGator Review

Finally, I turned to HostGator at the recommendation of a friend. They provide unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth in addition to a static ip to host your sites that makes administration 100% easier. Since I had been burnt before, I was very cautious to simply move all my blogs to another service, so I just moved one at a time. Fortunately, since they offer the first month of their service for only a penny with a promo code, I figured that there couldn't be any harm in giving the service a try. Wow was I surprised when I logged in the first time. The control panel was laid out in a very organized fashion and it was easy to find all the features I used most often. At first it was almost overwhelming with all the features that they offered in the control panel… some of the features I had wished the other service providers offered. In the CPanel, there were even indicators that showed process usage of my sites in addition to real time visitor stats. When I had the first blog up and running, I was impressed that the speed was at least 2x that of GoDaddy with every single test. This service was a little bit more than GoDaddy after the first month at $9.99, but the extra 2 bucks are well worth the reliability and additional traffic that has resulted.

In Conclusion

I am now a loyal HostGator user and would highly recommend it to anyone looking to host their site on a reliable service that is easy to use and also has all the bells and whistles.