Finding new webhosting

This site used to be at Network Solutions for hosting, but has recently moved over to GoDaddy. NetSol ended up being more costly than what I was prepared to pay, and adding that on top of some real difficulties in managing the back end, and it was time to move on. Trawling through some webdesign and programming forums, I saw a mention of Web Hosting Bluebook that apparently had a pretty good overview of hosting companies and their relative merit.

On the site, I was presented with a straightforward list of hosting companies, with the most well known names included such as hostmonster, hostgator, 1and1, and GoDaddy. Each of these companies has an in-depth review, which clearly breaks down the features of the hosting plan (both for the domain and email), the reputation of the company, pricing structure, back end administration options, and how the support performs.

On the right-hand side of each review, there are 3 tables. These cover Overview details, Trust Factors such as uptime and numbers of customers, Host Rating that gives each benefit a score against the competition, and an Overall score for the hosting company.

I found the reviews on Web Hosting Bluebook to be both comprehensive and meaningful. One of the things that immediate stood out to me was that NetSol wasn't included in their reviews, whether this is due to NetSol not making the cut or that the site hasn't got around to NetSol yet, I don't know. In any case, after looking at the overall scores and general pricing, I read a few hosting reviews in detail.

My criteria for good hosting is uptime, the ability to edit .htaccess files, PHP MyAdmin, PHP 5, and plenty of bandwidth available both as a maximum and in bursts. For this, I really ended up with two choices, either hostmonster or GoDaddy. After visiting both sites, I found GoDaddy's back end admin to be more straightforward. And that, for me, is worth the extra couple of dollars per month that they charge for hosting.

I did find Web Hosting Bluebook quite helpful in this process. Before I visited that site, I'd read up quite a bit and knew what to look for, and the information was both well structured and complete. In fact, the site has plenty of articles on web hosting and making websites as well. So, if you're looking for website hosting, it's worth heading over there for some hosting reviews.

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