Web hosts, compared

Comparing Web Hosts from the choices listed on our course Blog for Practical Internet Marketing:

• Dream Host: I would never use them. First off, their website is very slow this morning on my end, which is red flag. Next, their status pages show hardware problems they have had recently and lots of people responded, saying they have not had email access, among other issues. Scratch them off.
• Ipower Web page loads fast. Prices very competitive and they have a price guarantee. Not to mention a live chat for support, which is good. If your website is down that’s good to be able to do. My web hosting company offers this and I have used it a couple of times. Ipower’s products page, only offers four different hosting plans. That would indicate to me that as my needs grow, they may not be able to take care of my growth. Most companies have more choices.
• Lunar Pages hosting: Great prices indicated and they do show lots of hosting choices too. Red flag for me though is their claim of giving “$700 Coffee Cup Software FREE!” Nothing is free especially expensive software. It scares me when a company makes these claims.
• The company I use is called A Plus.net and I’ve been using them for many years. They have redundant backbones, 99% uptime guarantee, and they are an accredited Domain Name seller through ICANN. They also employ the instant chat with Support mentioned above.

Negative:

• Go Daddy. I have several customers that have registered Domains with Go Daddy, and I’ve had nothing but problems with getting their sites working. I have found their Support to be very lacking and uncooperative when there were issues. I will never spend any money in their direction, now that I have had to use them when a customer registered with them.