BlueHost is an indepentently owned and operated hosting company based in Orem, Utah.
BlueHost has been providing hosting services since 1996 and is well established as a serious hosting company.
Our BlueHost test site showed good response and uptimes.
Powweb was founded in 1999 and has been a pioneer in “low cost” web hosting.
One major characteristic of Powweb today is that they have built and maintain their own infrastructure and operations software. They do not rely on third party software integration like many others do.
Created: 1999
Parent company: Endurance
Our Powweb test site showed acceptable response times for static pages. However, dynamic pages including MySQL queries were slow. Too slow…
LunarPages is a well known host which has been operating out of Los Angeles, CA since 2000. After building a solid reputation for reliability and support in the shared hosting market, LunarPages has branched out to Dedicated, Reseller and VPS hosting.
Datacenter locations: Los Angeles CA, Riverside CA and Las Vegas NV – Datacenter photos »
Call center location: La Habra, California.
Customers: 150,000 +
Created: 2000
CEO: Ron Riddle
Parent company: Add2Net
Our Lunar Pages test site showed to be very responsive. FTP transfers were equaly fast and the control panel did not hang at any time.
Every now and then we get feedback from a user complaining that this or that hosting company canceled their account without warning. And when checking up on it it always turns out they were hosting "adult content" or something else which is clearly against the Terms of Service (TOS) of almost all hosting companies.
Most of the time it's outright porn...
For those of you who think it is unfair or discriminatory or whatever, here are a few reasons to help you understand why the vast majority of hosting companies will not allow "adult contents" on their hosting plans:
The hosts tend to get a lot of expensive and distracting contacts from the FBI inspecting on child pornography.
The sites tend to not publish their content with the appropriate legal disclaimers.
They tend to generate above average DMCA complaints.
The resource usage is unpredictable and can go wild at any time.
Those sites tend to have a short life span and the hosts are statistically left with a lot of unpaid bills.
And finally, a very important one: as a hosting company, asking your support staff to deal and help debug sites with a lot of potentially offending graphic content may severely impede on your recruitment options.
Now that being said, there are a couple of companies whose staff actually don't mind, let alone enjoy, working on the latest 21st century creative sex trends or whatever it might be. If you want to do adult hosting go with one of them (Cirtex Hosting for example). If you're not sure, read the TOS! Failure to do so is the best way to get your account canceled. And by all means, don't complain to us!
HostMonster is a newer sister brand to the renowned BlueHost (since 1996). It is owned and operated by the same team out of their offices in Orem, Utah.
HostMonster is geared both towards professional and individual sites with a slightly lower price point than its direct competition.
Our Host Monster test site showed good response and uptimes.
We were able to perform 6 simultaneous FTP transfers, which makes upload very fast.
Control panel: cPanel 11 - Up to date
Application installers:
Simple Scripts - Excellent availability of recent apps!
Fantastico Deluxe - Up to date
HostMonster's skinning is light enough not to get in the way. A handful of promotional items at the top tend to be annoying at first but can be collapsed.
Their proprietary Simple Scripts application installer is currently the best in the industry.
User feedback shows excellent satisfaction rates, especially for those clients balancing the level of support with the lower price point.
HostMonster is also known to have extremely good response times, both by email and by phone. There have been a few hickups at times of rapid growth in the past but it seems HostMonster now has the situation under control and support is back to its highest levels.
MySQL 5.0.45 - Up to date
PHP 5.2.45 - Up to date
UTF-8 and mbstring: supported
Overall, the platform is state of the art.
Section updated April 30th, 2008.
HostMonster is running mod_suPHP and there is strong isolation between user accounts. (FastCGI is also available)
SFTP is not available.
Overall security is good.
