Fatcow Mail

Since 2004 the number of Internet domains registered has more than doubled. Likewise the number of web hosting services has skyrocketed. If your in the market to find a host, it can be very confusing to say the least -singling out one among thousands of similar offers and company's.

Web hosting review sites are virtually all affiliate marketing scams where the “Top Ten” are in reality the top ten payouts to the site owner and are very often dreadful hosts.

Finding an excellent host at a good price will take a little time and effort, but will be well worth it if you want to avoid lots of headaches and frustrations which will be your lot with the wrong host.

So, if you research potential hosts from these six angles you are virtually guaranteed success.

1. Web host search sites
2. Review sites ( there are a couple honest ones)
3. Public forums
4. Hard info
5. Host's site recon
6. Google search

1) Hosting Search Sites: These sites allow you to input your requirements like disk space, bandwidth, budget, e-commerce, ssl, database scripting languages, shared/dedicated server etc.
Then they return a list of hosts to match.
Two of the best are:

*findmyhost.com (click on “Get a Quote” at the top right of page)

*hostsearch.com (click on “Host Search at the top left”)

2) Review Sites: Remember, I said “virtually all ” are scam sites . These two have a pretty solid rep on the public forums and on the net in general.

* webhostingjury.com: Has a large number of reviews going back a few years which is what you want and the owner keeps watch for phoney baloney reviews, although some inevitably get by. Also its not like Consumer Reports – he does run host ads so if a host protests a particular review, he gives the host the benefit of the doubt. That's not to say he covers for his advertisers across the board, there's tons of juicy negative posts to read.

* whreviews.com: High reputation site that campaigns against the widespread practice of “overselling” in the hosting industry. That's where the host advertises impossible to meet amounts of bandwidth, diskspace, add-on domains etc. and then buries conditions it the “Terms of Service” and “Acceptable Use” policies that make it a practical impossibility to achieve. Publishes a list of “Honest Hosts”.

3) Forums: There's gold in these places. This is where people speak freely about their experiences with particular hosts and you are free to sign in and read all the unvarnished reviews you like, but go in with a list of candidates gotten from step #1 and #2 and maybe a few others you've heard about, otherwise you could be here for a long long time, because these places are huge!

* webhostingtalk.com: This is the biggest forum dedicated to web hosting and by far the most influential. Make sure you have a clock nearby- you will lose track of time.
* Dnforums: Large, very well known site, industry insiders hang out here. Go to the “Hosting” section.
* NamePros: Another large forum full of knowledgeable people and insiders. Go to the “Hosting” section .

Any one of these three forums will be more than enough for your research. These are just the three best and largest on on the web.

4) Hard Stats: This is where to go for hard, objective statistics like: Peak Uptime, Web Speed and Response time. Essential info:

* RealMetrics: Great site, each site is exhaustively tested daily. If the site your interested is not on the list , do a site search.
* DomainTools: You can find out tons of info on any host here like how long they have been in business, public or hidden (not good) whois info.

5) Host Site: Definitely check out the prospective host's web site. Does it look professional or poorly done. Does it have a separate billing page where you are shown exactly what your paying for? Most importantly send a pre-sales email to time the response- should be less the 24 hrs.

* Do they offer cpanel and support for the scripting languages you need?

* Look for a support forum and go there if they do. Ask people what they think. Look for the absence of negative posts, even a great host should have a few. If they don't they have been deleting them- not a good sign.

* Support should be staffed 24/7 by skilled people and available thru multiple channels: live chat, 24/7 email, online knowledge base, online flash tutorials, and FAQ.

* Do they allow month to month billing? That's a must – you do not want to be locked in at the start of your relationship with them for a year or more.
* Do the have a 30-day money back guarantee ? (Make sure they do. )

6) Google : When you have your very short list- google them and see what that brings to light. It should return a lot of interesting things like more reviews, stats, and company news .

That's it ! Oh, and don't register a domain with them no matter if it's free or not, that will allow you to give them an immediate boot if you have to.

There are thousands of hosting services out there so just work with a list of a dozen or so and narrow it down using these methods and you will avoid all the nightmares that you'll read about in the forums. Good-luck!

Talkspot was, for a few years, the best-kept secret around in free web hosting. As of some point last year, however, they put a pretty drastic cap on free service – new sites made since then can only create a maximum of something like ten seperate pages (although there's apparently no limit to the size of each page.) It still works pretty well for small, free websites however, and sites that existed prior to the new policy were “grandfathered” in (like mine) and can continue to merrily suck up tons of bandwidth with as many new pages as we want. Honestly, I feel a little bad about that now, so I thought the least I could do (aside from paying for a yearly subscription, which my broke butt is working on) was to do a little write-up of the service, my experience with it, and why I think it's the best deal in hosting for the money right now.

So basically, if you pay $70 per year, you get everything that you got back when the site was free, and then some. You get unlimited storage space and pages and all that, but now you also get a .com domain name of your choosing, a lot more prefab design templates to choose from, a lot more prefab tools for creating things like shopping carts, and all sorts of blog-style “widgets” . $70 a year breaks down to about $5.85 or so per month, which is about what GoDaddy charges you for just a domain name reg, a couple of email addresses and maybe ten megabytes of storage space or so. Oh, and crap service. Talkspot does not have crap service. Quite the opposite.

Talkspot is actually run by Ken Williams (former head of Sierra On-Line for you classic PC gaming fans out there) and his son D.J., and at least one of them seems to be available almost constantly answering questions by e-mail and responding to posts on the forums. Their total website count is still in the tens of thousands, and I don't know if this level of personal contact will continue if the site gets up into the hundreds of thousands, but at the moment it is very nice. Getting an actual human being to communicate with in a timely fashion is an extreme rarity in budget hosting, much less to have the actual people running the show responding to you within a day or so of your query (even if you're a freeloader.)

The angle of approach that they take is that of ease of use. You're free to use FTP or a Web uploader to upload your own HTML and such, but they also let you create pages through a built-in WYSIWYG editor that somewhat resembles Microsoft Word. The editor has been steadily improved over the years, and I now find it easier to lay out a page than to enter the HTML code – and I've been doing HTML in Notepad since 1996! You can also “toggle” WYSIWYG at any time, so you can do the basic layout of the page and insert pictures easily with it, and then turn it off to insert Google Adsense or similar code snips. The only downside to the editor is that it can be a butt to load sometimes on a slow connection, but if you have reasonably fast broadband, it really is the way to go.

If you're not experienced at all with web design but want to create a page yourself, they also offer something like 100 templates now to start off with. These function sort of like the pre-fab templates in Blogger and Wordpress and similar services, complete with “widgets” you can add for different functionality. I don't run a shopping site, so I can't comment extensively on this, but they do seem to offer some sort of pre-fab “shopping cart” system as well. They also offer web consulting services through some sort of design team that they contract with, though you'd have to e-mail for pricing on that, I didn't see a reference to it on the site anywhere.

The site encourages you to build a free page with them to check everything out, and then if it works for you, you can subscribe to gain the extra space and extra features. If not, hey, you haven't lost anything but a little time. Free sites made at Talkspot also have no advertising forced on them, although you are free to put in your own ads as you see fit.

http://talkspot.com/