Hostmonster Review

October 10, 2008

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this Hostmonster review. I actually wrote, and published this review before I launched this “Dan Reviews” website. So instead of re-printing my review in full here, I’ve taken snippets and turned them into the mini-review that you can see on this page. If you’d like to read my full Hostmonster review, please click here, or, if you’d prefer to read this version, let’s get started!

The Price

At the time of writing Hostmonster offers one set package to customers. The price of the package depends on the length of the contract you decide to take out – like most hosts, the longer you sign up for the cheaper your bill will be at the end of the month!

The Price

It is also worth noting that Hostmonster will supply you with a free domain name if you sign up to their hosting plan. When compared to other web hosts, I usually find that there isn’t much difference when it comes to pricing – almost everyone seems to fall within the same pricing range give or take a couple of dollars. However, not all hosts will offer you a free domain name. A domain name may not cost much nowadays but it’s always nice to get something for free!

Some people are very caucious however when purchasing a domain name from the same place you have hosting, some hosts may hold the domain name hostage if you cancel your hosting package, so do bear that in mind when trying to save a few dollars here and there.

Reliability

For the excellent uptime I have experienced whilst using Hostmonster I am going to give it top marks. This is the highest score I can give and, in my opinion, it is fully justified. My site has been online for the best part of 18 months and I have suffered no downtime and no business has been lost.

I say I’ve suffered “no downtime”, but in all honesty I’m not one of these people that sits at my PC 24 hours a day refreshing my website every couple of minutes. So it’s possible there was some downtime, but certainly no prolonged downtime that was noticed by both me, or my website visitors/customers.

Control Panel

I often feel that this is one of the most overlooked aspects of any web host. An easy-to-use control panel can save you hours of hard work. There are countless times I have been forced to stumble around a badly-designed control panel looking for features that might not even exist. Thankfully, Host monster uses the “cPanel” control panel.

The “cPanel” is my personal favourite control panel, mainly for its pleasant appearance and its layout. Everything that you would possibly need to do can be done from the “cPanel” and can usually be reached within a couple of clicks.

There are also tons of cPanel tutorials out there for you to use if you do run into problems. A quick search on Google for “cPanel 11 video tutorials” will yield thousands of results.

Features

It’s all well and good having a great pricing plan, control panel and uptime, but none if this matters unless the hosting plan has the features you need. As far as features go, you will find it difficult to top Hostmonster’s package. Here is a breakdown of what I feel are the most important parts of the Host monster package:

200 GB Disk Space

2,000 GB of Bandwidth (per month!)

Host unlimited Domains

Free Domain name

Fantastico

100 MYSQL Databases

PHP4 and PHP5 Support (You choose)

The first two bullet points are the first things you should look for in a host. This is the amount of disk space and bandwidth you will receive. 200 GB of Disk Space and 2,000 GB of Bandwidth will be more than enough for any website, even one packaged with multimedia files! I run a number of sites on my package and I have never come anywhere near my disk space or bandwidth allowance.

Hostmonster Overselling

This is a new section that I’m going to add to some of my hosting reviews. I can reveal that hostmonster DO oversell, but there’s no need to worry. Pretty much all of the big shared hosts do the same thing and it doesn’t make them any less viable as a choice for your business. Click here to read my hosting overselling review. (Opens in a new window)

Support

Last, but not least, I look at the single most important aspect behind any good webhost – the support system! Before you sign up to any web hosting program you should make sure that you know what type of support is available to you and how helpful that support is going to be when you do need to use it. I always send a test email with a general hosting question BEFORE I sign up with anyone – that way you can check too see how fast the response time is and how helpful the support is.

I did this test with Hostmonster and am pleased to say that they passed with flying colours. First of all I emailed them a rather technical question via their helpdesk; I asked them about ION CUBE (a PHP encryptor) and if they allowed you to edit the php.ini files. Within 2 hours my question had been answered by a friendly, competent technician and he even offered to do any ION CUBE installations for me if I had any problems.

Conclusion

As I mentioned at the start, the review on this page is only a very small snippet of my full review. You can find out why I didn’t give Hostmonster full marks by reading my full hostmonster review.

My Final Hostmonster Review Score:

(4 out of 5)