General

GoDaddy is an independently owned and operated web services company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Founded in 1997, they are the world?s largest domain registrar with more than 6.5 million customers worldwide.

Go Daddy offers 24/7 round the clock call center operations with no outsourcing or off-shoring.  They operate 4 physically dispersed data centers, which better equips them to deal with natural disasters, potential terrorist attacks, etc.

Among the many awards and honors listed on their website, GoDaddy received Domainer?s Choice Award for Best Hosting Company 2008.

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General

In the US, JustHost is based in Gendale, CA. In the UK, they are located in Fareham. They also have offices in Adelaide, Australia. By having started their operations once web hosting technologies were already mature, JustHost has a competitive advantage over older competitors since they can provide state of the art web hosting technology to all their clients. They do not have to deal with inefficient legacy systems.

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General

FastDomain is a newer sister brand to the renowned HostMonster & BlueHost brands (since 1996). It is owned and operated by the same team out of their offices in Orem, Utah.

FastDomain is geared both towards professional and individual sites with a slightly lower price point than its direct competition.

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After a year of relentless escalation, most shared web hosting plans now come with "Unlimited" disk space and bandwidth!

Too good to be true?

YES INDEED!

Don't fall for it! Many restrictions apply!

Of course, the terms & conditions of each hosting company and or hosting plan will vary, but most of the time, if you try to really go unlimited you will hit one of these limits:

• The unlimited diskspace can only be used for public web content. It cannot be used for:

• password protected content

• or backups

• etc.

• The unlimited bandwidth can only be used for "regular web pages", not for:

• videos

• software downloads

• podcasts

• etc.

• There may still be limitations on the number of web requests per second your server can handle.

• There may still be limitations on the processor time your scripts can use.

Does it matter?

NO, NOT REALLY!

Unless you're actually trying to run high traffic sites at virtually no cost, you should not really be concerned about this. Actually, the fact that everybody has aligned on "unlimited" will let you shift your focus on more interesting differentiating factors between software companies, such as:

• Is their software up to date?

• Is their platform secure?

• Is their tech support helpful?

• Is your site going to be fast enough?

• What is your commitment and can you change your mind if the hosting company doesn't live up to their claims and/or your expectations?

To answer all these questions, we recommend that you check out web host reviews, user feedback and tests sites already running with the company you have in mind (important for checking speed).

For more info on choosing a webhost, check out our Web Hosting 101 »

Sometimes you will be given a dedicated server or a VPS and you won't know exactly which flavor or distribution of Linux it is running.

Here is how you can find out when logged in through SSH:

# uname -a

This generally won't tell you as much as you'd like.

# cat /proc/version

This will generally tell you more than you'd like.

Once you know that you are running Red Hat for example, you can get to the point with:

# cat /etc/redhat-release

Or on Debian:

# cat /etc/debian_version