Best Web Hosting 2006

On this day in 2006 UK hosting provider EasySpace announced that they were launching a new business package for small to mid sized businesses. The package included a free domain name, a 3 page template for building a web site, 10 email accounts antivirus software and email filters for the email accounts internet security software and a blog. Looking at this package today it is obvious that this was not a very robust package for small to mid sized businesses. A small business might be able to get by with only 10 email accounts but in this day and age a mid sized business would be left with too few emails. In addition the blog feature has very little value for a small business unless they were going to heavily market themselves on the internet.

More news included the announcement of UnitedHost, also out of the UK announcing that they had surpassed 10,000 Hosted clients. XO communications, telecommunications provider, announced that they hired Rick Scott as senior vp of network services.

1and1 web hosting provider announced today that they had earned the Gold Certified Status from Microsoft through the Microsoft Web hosting partner provider program. The certification came about as a result of 1and1 displaying their competency in Sharepoint & Exchange solutions.

On this date DemoDemo’s founder Vito Ceniti announced that they would offer their flash based web video tutorial service on a monthly subscription basis. DemoDemo has for years been working with the web hosting industry to try to provide easy to walk through video tutorials for web hosting customers for all aspects of the features in cpanel, and plesk. These video tutorials have allowed for enhanced customer service for the do-it-yourself webmaster community who would rather go to a live video tutorial rather than wait on the phone or wait for an email reply to their technical question. In many cases these tutorials have allowed web hosting companies to drastically reduce their phone hold times as novices can use the tutorials to setup their basic features like email & webmail. The subscription was immediately extended to all web hosting providers and the thought is that other online ecommerce startups could use it for their web based services.

On this date HostedToday also announced that they had increased their web hosting plan specs by tenfold. This is one of those stories that shows why 2006 was so tumultuous for the web hosting community as web hosting providers were constantly squeezed to offer “greater” packages in order to compete with the hyper competitive hosting companies whose primary goal was to grow as fast as they could disregarding customer service or support.

Netfirms also on this date announced new advanced features for their customers including the capability of viewing their web hosting control panel in multiple languages and an updated version of wordpress offered to all their customers.

Hello anyone,

My name is Marge and along with a bunch of other dedicated and part time (but also very dedicated) webmasters we created the bestwebhosting2006.com site to tell you about what was happening in web site hosting in 2006. FYI we also have moved on to report information about web hosting in 2007 & web hosting in 2008.

2006 was a wild ride for many of us in web site hosting as we saw the emergence of the super large web hosting companies go out & just try to acquire as much business as they possibly could through completely unjustified plan increases and mind boggling discounts to new customers.

Some of the more notable companies that we see as emerging in the market as leaders are well known names like: Lunarpages, Bluehost, Startlogic and Dot5Hosting.

As we try to recreate some of the driving forces behind web hosting in 2006 we will see many references to these companies as well as others who also tried to stay competitive but without sacrificing so much integrity for their system environments.

So begins a reflection of 2006 web hosting,

Marge