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.
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.
InMotion hosting has been providing businesses with web hosting since 2001 from their offices in Los Angeles, CA and Virginia Beach, VA. They do not outsource tech support -- all support is done from their Virgina Beach office.
They are the only host in this price range to give you the option of hosting from two geographically different data centers - one in downtown L.A. and the other just outside of Washington, DC.
Having the option to choose a datacenter near you can save you a lot of time if your business heavily relies on interacting with your website backoffice during the day.
InMotion's position is definitely oriented towards business hosting rather than personal web hosting. They offer the whole range of hosting plans from starter shared hosted plans, to virtual private servers to dedicated / managed servers.
[stars:5] Our InMotion test site showed to be very responsive.
We were able to perform 10 simultaneous FTP transfers, which is outstanding and makes site maintenance extremely fast.
InMotion uses the industry proven cPanel architecture. No surprises there. The default settings allow for good operation without running into annoying limitations.
The default settings allow for reasonable operation without running into annoying limitations.
[stars:5] Our satisfaction surveys show that what their customers appreciate the most is the quality of the tech support.
This concurs with our own findings that InMotion Hosting focus on the latest proven stable version of server software components in order to provide their clients with the highest stability and a seamless experience.
We have also noticed that InMotion was rated "A+" by the Better Business Bureau (L.A.) which is excellent and sufficiently rare in the hosting industry to be noted.
[stars:5] Overall, the platform is pretty cutting-edge and also offers free SSD drives which are much faster than the traditional hard drives used by most other hosting companies.
Section updated in March 2017
[stars:4.5] Overall security is good.
SFTP is not available but FTP over TLS/SSH is supported, which provides equal levels of security.
