Best Web Hosting 2006

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.

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.