General

HostMetro is a relatively new hosting company born from the reunion of several web hosting industry veterans. They have of 50 years of combined experience and they are set out to make things right.

Features

HostMetro won't make false claims about unlimited space and bandwidth (like many competitors do) but they assure you you will have enough for any normal web site (which means you can't run a file archiving service or a video sharing site; oustide of that you never have to worry about space or transfer limitations).

General

Originally founded in 1998, iPage started as a full web solution provider based in Burlington, MA. But after 2000, they put their activities on hold to restart as a 100% web hosting company in 2007. With a leading team composed of the top men in the business and an aggressive hosting plan, iPage has made a powerful come-back.

Today, iPage's platform serves over 1,000,000 web sites and they are one of the top well known brands in the web hosting industry.

• Founded: 1998 - switched to 100% hosting in 2007
• Owner: EIG (Endurance International Group)
• Founder and CEO: Thomas Gorny
• Office location(s): Burlington, MA
• Data center location(s): 2 in Massachusetts

iPage offers a single all-in-one hosting plan -- in the Standard / Shared web hosting category -- which includes everything most individuals and small business need.

Green / Environment focus

iPage is also seriously involved in the Green Hosting initiative: in order to minimize their carbon footprint, iPage purchases Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to cover the usage of electricity for their servers and offices. Relying 100% on wind energy, iPage offsets an energy efficiency comparable to planting 2,390 acres of trees.

If you want to support the green hosting initiative, iPage will give you your own Green Badge to place on your web site. This can be an asset for your business and attract more customers.

General

HostGator is an independent hosting company created by Brent Oxley in 2002. They are based in Houston, TX which is a good central point for serving all of the US with minimum access times (latency). Today they are one of the world’s 10 largest hosting companies, but despite the growth, Brent still takes personal involvement in customer satisfaction and will often handle concerns personally.

• Customers: 250,000 +
• Hosted domains: 3,500,000 +
• Created: 2002
• CEO: Brent Oxley
• Based in: Houston, TX.

HostGator’s offering covers several web hosting product families, which is an advantage if you ever want to upgrade to a more complex hosting solution:

• Standard / Shared web hosting
• Reseller hosting
• VPS hosting (Managed)
• Dedicated hosting (Managed)

Green hosting / Environmental considerations

HostGator is powered by 130% wind energy – by purchasing more certified Renewable Energy Credits (REC’s) than they actually consume – which makes them a Green hosting company. They also strive to use the most energy efficient servers possible. See details »

Standard / Shared web hosting

The standard web hosting offer is shared hosting, which means you share a server with other clients.

Our first selection is done through Web Hosting Tests who tests several hundreds of hosting offers anonymously.

With the best of these hosts, we then set up specific test accounts in order to verify they perform well with b2evolution.

You can check those test sites out for yourself to see how good or not a particular host is, especially in terms of server speed / bandwidth...

Here is a list of public test sites we have set-up:

1. BlueHost
2. FastDomain
3. FatCow
4. GreenGeeks
5. HostColor
6. HostGator
7. HostMonster
8. HostPapa
9. HostingPlex
10. JustHost
11. LunarPages
12. PowWeb
13. SuperGreen

You may actually wish to check back on these test sites at times that matter the most to you, in order to see if you'll get good server speed at that time of the day. It is often ok to wait a second more for a web page to load, but it gets painful when every page of an administrative interface takes 1 second too long!

General

SiteCloud is the first load balanced cloud hosting provider that features the popular cPanel control panel. What differentiates SiteCloud from other CPanel web hosts is that they load balance their infrastructure versus placing all the customers and services on a single server.

Based out of Santa Monica, CA, SiteCloud is owned and operated by industry veteran Trey Gardner.

SUMMERHOST - £5 off web hosting

SUMMERSERVER - £15 off dedicated servers

SUMMERCOMMERCE - £10 off ecommerce packages

(these coupon codes are valid until Sept 5th)

General

WebHostingHub is a top hosting company in the budget category.  They are completely US based with technical support, sales, and customer service done from their office in Virginia. In addition, they have two data centers, one in Ashburn, VA and one on the West Coast in Los Angeles, CA.

All of their equipment is very modern, some of the largest and fastest machines of any hosting company we reviewed. Our tests showed exceptional response times and top uptimes.

Yahoo! is a large corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Yahoo is mainly known for its search engine as well as email services along with web hosting. As of 2010, the corporation laid claim to the largest share of online advertising in the world.

• Year Founded: 1994
• Incorporated: March 1, 1995
• Founder: Jerry Yang and David Filo - Electrical Engineering Graduates, Stanford
• CEO: Carol Bartz
• Office Location: Sunnyvale, CA
• Sister Companies: del.ico.us, Flickr, Fire Eagle, FoxyTunes, Upcoming, Wretch