Best Web Hosting 2006

Domain Register Joker.com came under attack by a DDOS (denial of service) attack today and it is believed that most of the 550,000 + domain names registered with Joker suffered some form of downtime due to the attack although it is believed there was no security breach in the attack. Joker.com announced the security measures they were implementing after the attack including adding more name severs and acquiring more bandwidth.

The Identity and Turst assurance solution provider Comodo announced plans today to purchase an England Security software maker  Indicii Salu. The details of the deal are undisclosed at this time.

Dedicated Server company ServePath announced the launch and spinoff of it’s content streaming solutions company UpStreamingNetworks.com which will leverage ServePath’s network services. The content network will target small to midsized businesses and allow their web sites to be filled with the new company’s content.

I remember when I first was introduced to ipowerweb. It was back in 2001 and iPowerweb was not nearly the web hosting giant that it is today. Back then they had 1000 customers and offered good service with about 12 people on staff. At that time iPowerWeb was still located in California in Santa Monica.

Back then they only had 1 package, their iPowerweb pro package which included a free domain and came with 150mb of space, 5gb bandwidth and their own control panel. Since that time iPowerweb has expanded greatly. They now offer 3 shared web hosting packages along with VPS hosting and Dedicated Server hosting. They have since moved to Phoenix where they built a 50,000 sq foot data center and this past year they were purchased by the Endurance Group International out of Boston.

There was a fair bit of news today.

Cira, which is the Canadian version of ICANN pulled out of the internet governing body which ICANN is a member. What we know from this move now is that Cira has established that they would be the sole body for checking Canadian citizenship, and apply their 6.5% tax to all .ca domain names.

The online game Warcraft experienced downtime recently due to over use of the systems that support the online game.

JumpStart web hosting services got hit with a $900,000 civil penalty for allowing some of their clients to send emails regarding a Free Flix Tix promotion whch the FTC says violated the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act. This is supposed to be the largest penalty yet for illegal spam. Result? We dont see much of JumpStart these days.

The WHIR’s March web host magazine issue arrived at my door the other day. This is one of the few hard copy magazines that gets circulation within the web hosting industry. This month’s issue was about marketing in the web hosting industry.

In there they usually have an interview with the head of some web hosting company or a dedicated server company. This month’s issue featured Brent Oaxley from HostGator. I have known Brent for several years having been competitors once way back and he is a good guy. HostGator is a quality web hosting company and Brent and everyone down there do good work. HostGator was located in Florida and has since moved to Texas.

One thing that we saw an explosion of in 2006 was reseller hosting services. Basically a reseller is someone who creates their own web hosting company using the technologies, hardware and billing software of another established web hosting company. The problem with this is that with the exception of the customer support, the entire success or failure of the reseller company lies within the parent company’s capabilities to maintain good service and uptime.

Reseller hosting in a nutshell is when someone creates a web hosting company and they partner with a larger web hosting company, usually a shared web hosting company and they buy volume plans at a reduced cost basis from that parent shared web hosting company. Then the reseller re-brands the web hosting packages that they have purchased and they mark up those plans so that they make a healthy profit margin and they resell those web hosting packages.

Godaddy is a perfect example of a large company that offers reseller hosting services through their Godaddy reseller services. In the case of Godaddy you can even setup a web hosting reseller account & not have to do any of the sales or support yourself. Reselling with Godaddy as most shared web hosting companies will not provided unbranded support for you or your clients, you would have to do that yourself. If you run across a web site hosting company whose area codeis (408), go to the Godaddy site & check out their phone number on their site. If they are the same you know that the site you visited is a Godaddy reseller account.

Another popular shared web hosting company who got into reseller hosting is HostGator. HostGator was one of the first shared web hosts to deviate away from trying to market heavily against the other large shared web hosts and they developed plans for resellers to be able to own and operate their own web hosting sites. HostGator has done better than most when it comes to supporting those resellers, but have the resellers done well in supporting the end clients, each one is different with it’s pluses and minuses.

Sorry there was no new news on this date as it was a sunday, more news to be reported tomorrow.

One thing that irritates most web hosting customers is the fact that if they call into tech support (or even sales and billing) that most web hosting companies are not staffed adequately enough to handle the volume. What those companies do is either put the customers into a holding pattern for the next available agent or they will ask the customer to leave a message otr call back later.

Unfortunately there is no resource like the one we are about to post here available for the web hosting industry (we wish there was on) but at least this resource will help you out in your other life.

GetHuman.com lists hundreds of companies you & I work with every day, from our banks to our phone service carriers and this site tells you how when you call, how to bypass the message system and to get you directly to a live person. Gethuman.com was developed by Paul English in 2006.

Check it out & test it for yourself and we believe that you will love this resource the next time you are on hold waiting for your bank or whatever.

One of the new shining examples from 2006 was a company called HostMonster. This company made a huge splash by offering unlimited domain hosting. HostMonster has a terrific uptime record, they offer 24×7x365 support by phone and email.

The Hostmonster package is large enough to more web sites than any webmaster we have interviewed who uses their system so you really cannot ever run out of disk space or bandwidth while trying to build your unlimited sites.

We still recommend Hostmonster highly in our bestwebhosting2008.com site and they have been in the #1 spot there as recently as January 2008. In addition HostMonster was our #1 overall pick for 2007 and has an opportunity to repeat this year as well.

Looking back on 2006 and how we have taken down our rankings and reviews we thought it was important to reflect on which host had the best year in 2006. There were tons of competitors for our top 10 list and obviously because there were only 10 spots there were a number of good web hosts, along with plenty of lousy web hosts, which did not make our list.

Overall for the year 2006 Bluehost was our consistent top choice, not only for our web developers who were out testing all of the hosting companies but through all of the user reviews, good and bad, Bluehost for the year had the most consistency.

Bluehost is out of Orem Utah, they own their own data facilities, offer exceptional phone, chat & email support 24×7x365 and they offered a terrific plan back in 2006 where you can host 6 web sites on 1 plan. They have since upgraded that plan to an unlimited addon domain package.

Bluehost continues to rank well in our bestwebhosting2008.com site and maintains a very good support and service reliability.

This was a Saturday and no new news was reported for this day.