We would like to be as neutral as possible when it comes to reviewing web host. And so, we decided to buy a web hosting from SnoobHosting just to know how much they can offer. But the result of our investigation can not be spoiled by just buying and reviewing upfront, we actually bought a 1 year web hosting from them and experience first hand what they have to offer.

snoobhosting History

SnoobHosting was founded by a guy named Jeffrey de Lara while attending college. He was taking up computer engineering and wants to practice what he is learning when it comes to server administration. And also, this guy works as a web designer while studying. He offers web hosting to his design clients as part of his service and his client base grew as what we know now as snoobhosting.

snoobhosting Experience

We must admit that the experience we have with snoobhosting has been a breeze so far. The only problem we encountered was at the beginning when we don’t know what to do with the installation of our blog. But that was solved in minutes after I submitted a ticket. And look and behold, the owner himself, Jeffrey answered my inquiries and gave me special treatment. And most of all, pede ka mag tagalog!

The Hosting Server

We never had downtimes. Never. Not even once.

So that 99.9% Uptime really does live up to its name.

Our Verdict

If you like a stable and reliable web hosting service in the Philippines, we highly recommend SnoobHosting.net.

We won’t be cancelling our web hosting or moving out from them anytime soon.

You can visit their site here.

SnoobHosting is a web hosting provider in the Philippines that has been a very reliable business web hosting for us. In 3 years we never had a downtime.

So if you are looking for a reliable web hosting provider, you can trust snoobhosting.

Rating Out Of Ten

Performance    7
Reliability    8
Customer Relations    8
Features    9
Control Panel     4

Introduction

Easy CGI has a superior intuitive site, which provide potential clients with easier access to ordering information. They also offer the most unique product offerings. They offer Coldfusion, ASP, and even the new ASP.net technologies. Besides web hosting they also offer co-location, which shows that they are no small player.
If you need Windows 2000 hosting, the average provider will charge you around $20 or more per month with a setup fee. Easy CGI is an exception to that, with Windows 2000 hosting accounts starting at $7.96 per month. It comes with 3 GB of space and 50 GB of traffic. For storage, we have not found a company offering more. For Windows web hosting, Easy CGI is a very solid choice.

Price and Cost Effectiveness

Easy CGI was founded in 1998 and located in New York. Over the years, they have expanded their product offerings. They offer the most comprehensive Windows web hosting package we have ever seen. Their packages all come with ASP, MS Access and access to a shared ssl certificate. Plus they were the first company we have seen to offer ASP.net to the public. They also offer plenty of flexibility to their web hosting plans. You can add MsSQL and Coldfusion at any time.

Control Panel

One of the greatest weaknesses in this company is their control panel. Easy CGI’s control panel is very limited in what it is able to do. For one, it lacks much of the advanced features that are otherwise found in other control panels such as web creation tools, setting directories as CGI readable, etc. Their control panel is very basic, in that it only includes mailbox editing, and billing information. Rather than using a professional control panel software package with lots of features, they decided to make their own which is very basic. However, if you do not plan to use a control panel, then this should not matter. It does have all the basic functions, just nothing more and the interface needs some tweaking.

Data Center

We were unable to obtain much information about their date center. We do know though that they operate a data center and it is located in the same building as their corporate headquarters. This means they can easily solve problems if they were to occur.

Customer Relations

EasyCGI has improved their customer service dramatically over the past few years. With their vast years of experience in the industry, all of their service professionals have sufficient knowledge in the products they sell. You can ask them anything about the packages and they will answer promptly without hesitation. When we asked about Windows web hosting including version numbers of software and whether or not it would support our Windows ASP application, they were able to provide competent answers. EasyCGI also provides extended support hours from 9 to 5 six days a week.

Conclusion

All in all, Easy CGI is a viable web hosting provider. It offers everything one would expect in web hosting company. Even though they have a much weaker control panel than most web hosting companies, they offer consumers a great value in web hosting and they have above average technical support. They are definitely a choice to consider when you are seeking for a Windows web hosting provider or if you need a lot of storage space.

Bluehost Review Rating Out Of Ten

Performance 10
Reliability 10
Customer Relations 10
Features 9
Control Panel 9

Introduction of Bluehost

Bluehost is one of the internet’s most experienced personal and business web hosting companies. According to our latest survey and comments from our past readers, their web hosting offers the most consistent performance especially during peak time. While other web hosts that we reviewed are slower during the day, they are always consistent with their speed. Bluehost also has extremely knowledgeable and friendly staffs that are willing to assist you even if they are the simple problems. We called when we didn’t now how to use FrontPage to upload a site and when we linked the pictures using the wrong path name. While the other web hosting companies refused to help claiming it was too technical Bluehost assisted us. For the second year in the row, Bluehost has been recommended as our top choice for web hosting because of their commitment to quality support, superior uptime, fast performance, and massive features that comes preloaded into our accounts.

Pricing & Cost Effectiveness of Bluehost

Bluehost currently charges $4.95 per year for web hosting if you prepay for 2 years and $5.95 if you prepay for 1 year with free setup and domain name for a limited time. While other web hosting companies have lowered their pricing, Bluehost has always had the same price since they started as a web hosting company. It is how they are able to keep the quality of their hosting high, while other companies have lowered the quality of their web hosting because they rather focus on increasing the quantity of customers they have rather than on the quality of their web hosting. The pricing is very competitive in the industry because it covers the cost of the domain name and a lot of features are included such as the Fantastico suite and E-Commerce shopping cart and Blog software. The pricing also includes 24 hours technical support 7 days a week which is better than all of the hosts we have reviewed.

Bluehost Customer Relations

The customer service we have received from Bluehost has been exceptional. Whenever we called support whether it was at 3:00 AM at night or 12:00 PM in the afternoon, we were always able to get a hold of a technician while holding for less than a minute. The staffs were also very knowledgeable and they were always able to assist us from simple questions to high complex questions. They were very straight to the point. They even assisted us in setting up a Message Forums script when we had over fifteen questions on trying to install the software. Overall, we the company is very well managed considering the level of support we received for the little money that we paid monthly for their web hosting.

Bluehost Features & Control Panel Design

Bluehost utilizes the latest version of Cpanel in their web hosting with the plenty of software add-ons including Fantastico. This software is a graphical user interface tool that makes managing a website a piece of cake. They include a plethora of scripts from blog to chat to help desk, which can all be installed with a click of a button. The CPanel isn’t just the standard setup, but it is a fully loaded Cpanel with a lot of Add-on software. A value added feature is Telnet access, which is included free with their web hosting. A lot of business web hosting companies usually charge for this feature.

Conclusion - Editor’s Choice for Web Hosting

All in All, Bluehost is the best choice web hosting for your business and your personal needs. They offer a plethora of software that makes building a website a cinch, plus their support staff is one of the most knowledgeable in the industry. They also have the highest reliability rating of any web host, and their web hosting performance is top notch. For the second year in a row, Bluehost reigns over the competition and received the highest recommendation of a web hosting service.

Rating Out Of Ten

Performance 9
Reliability 8
Customer Relations 10
Features 8
Control Panel 8

Introduction

Lunarpages was founded in the summer of 2000 when Add2Net Corporation expanded its hosting offerings to include shared hosting.  For the previous 3 years, Add2Net had been successfully providing large scale managed and unmanaged hosting services.  This was the foundation for Lunarpages customer services and rock solid business hosting platforms.

Serving as the web hosting division of Add2Net, Inc., the staff and technical support team at Lunarpages has an established five year history in the web hosting industry. This is relatively long considering that most web hosting companies are overnight operations and in reality you need a company that will always be around. Lunarpages has earned a reputation as a provider with superior customer support and a solid web hosting data center. Unlike most web hosting companies, you can always get through the phone line with Lunarpages. Also, the $7.95 monthly plan offers everything you need in order to make the presence of your business successful on the web.

Price and Cost Effectiveness

Lunarpages offers decent pricing on their web-hosting plans. For a mere $6.95 a month, you receive up to 1500 GB of space and 15000 GB of traffic. Also, free domain name for life. They also offer a $22.95 web-hosting package, which has double the amount of features. But for most users, the $6.95 is sufficient enough. They also offer a descent amount of basic features here. In addition, you also get unlimited toll free support with all web hosting plans, which isn’t common in most web hosting companies. Among the many options available, they also offer the options to purchase ASP and JSP on the Linux platform .

Lunarpages Data Center

Lunarpages uses Dell Power Edge 2650 servers, with their data center located in downtown Los Angeles. Their latest servers are quad Xeon 2.4 GHz Xeon processors, with 6 GB of memory and three 70 GB Raid Disk Drive. Compared to other web hosting companies, they dominate over any other server offered by any Web Hosting company. They currently use state of the art net infrastructure equipment and plan to offer many new features in the future such as load balancing. Furthermore, they are connected to premium Tier-1 Backbone providers and are multi-home with Level3, Genuity and Cable and Wireless. As a result, you will get above average web hosting performance and reliability that other providers normally charge a premium for. They also constantly add servers onto their data center, meaning they are growing rapidly.

Lunarpages Customer Relations

Customer support at Lunarpages is superior and they are very responsive to your questions. Even e-mail support questions always get answered in a timely manner. This is very different from any other web hosting company out there. Accounts are usually setup the same day after they verify the order with you over the phone within thirty minutes to one hour. It is essential that a working phone number be inputted into the system in order for your account to be setup immediately. They also offer long support hours. Furthermore, they have a help desk system which enables you to view common question customer asks.

Cpanel Control Panel

Lunarpages currently utilizes the latest version of the CPanel 5 control panel. The features are pretty much the same to other CPanel, such as mailbox modification, password changes, ftp login modifications, statistical information, and so on. CPanel doesn’t offer any web-building tool, but for web hosting administration it offers the user an easy and intuitive interface along with powerfully packed features.

Conclusion

Lunarpages is definitely a good choice of web hosting for many users. Not only does it score tops with best features for the price, but it is also great because you can call toll-free when you are in need of assistance. Other companies offering plans this low normally require that you e-mail them for support inquires, and even if they did provide support over the phone, there would be long distance charges. Give Lunarpages a shot and you will not regret it.

Rating Out Of Ten

Performance 10
Reliability 10
Customer Relations 10
Features 9
Control Panel 9

Introduction of HostMonster

HostMonster offers one simple unique web hosting package starting at $4.95 (for a limited time only). With the package, they are offering unlimited storage space and traffic and unlimited domains. In this type of web host, you would expect subpar service and reliability. However, that is not the case with HostMonster. They not only offer superb service. Service that is only matched by our number one choice Bluehost, but they have top of the line performance for websites hosted on their server. They put fewer users on each server than other web hosts and they have the latest options on their servers including PHP5

Pricing & Cost Effectiveness of HostMonster

In many ways Host Monster is similar to our first choice for web hosts, but instead of focusing on businesses they focus more on the end user. Their website is more user friendly and the control panel (They use Cpanel) is slightly friendlier. Pricing of $4.95 is very competitive in the industry. Their regular rate is $5.95 per month for one year. Most $4.95 do not offer the array of features such as the Fantastico Suite, SSH and PHP5 for this cost. Looking at Network Solutions, they do not even offer the service that Host Monster offers but they charge at least twice as much as Host Monster with a two year prepayment. Host Monster also permits you to cancel at anytime without any fee.

HostMonster Customer Relations

Superb Customer service and fantastic response time is what separates Host Monster from the rest of the pack. The response to trouble tickets are phenomenal. We submitted a trouble ticket at 10:40 Eastern Time and a response came in at 10:48. If you don’t call that fast I don’t know what is. Even before we reviewed Host Monster, the average response time for a trouble ticket was two hours and we were already impressed by that. A phone call also took less than a minute before we were connected. When we called we were the first person in line and this was at different time intervals during the day. We tried night, morning, afternoon, and late afternoon. They also do not outsource their tech support, so all of their employees are here in America. They are very fluent in programming and hosting and you will not have any trouble understanding them.

Design and Ease of Use of Control Panel

Host Monster utilizes Cpanel for their web hosting. There control panel uses the default templates, but all of the features have been enabled including SSH. All the features like adding email addresses and deleting subdomains tend to be faster with Host Monster than other web hosts. Execution took only seconds when we added and removed hundreds of domains and email addresses during our test.

Conclusion - Editor’s Choice for Web Hosting

HostMonster is our second editor’s choice for the best web hosting company. Their ease of use, customer service, and high retention rate of past customers prove HostMonster cares about their clients and they will do whatever they can to ensure a maximum level of satisfaction.