Web Hosting Columns

When you first look at Alps HOST one can get the feeling that this another cheap, fly-by-night, no good hosting service. After all, there are some 8,000+ web hosting services online with five new ones popping up every day. Yet a closer look and some investigating may give one the overall impression that this may be the “Google” of web hosting.

Firstly, there is nothing flashy about the Alps HOST website. No savvy design, no flashy banners, no scrolling bonus or eye grabbing ad. Just a plain, simple Google –like hosting website. With everything right where you can find it.

Low Priced Packages

Secondly, and this may be the only reason, visitors can’t help but notice the low priced hosting packages starting at $3.95. Throw in a couple of freebies and you have buyers. Or, so we imagine. But whatever it is, people have been buying up this cheap web hosting – (Ad Spy).

Alps HOST also offers reseller hosting and domain names. All this on a windows platform. But it may be worth the while hooking up with them, after all they seem to have out spaced Google with their customer service.

100 Positive reviews

So far they are leading the “favorable reviews” competition on both Vista and Web Host Talk. So far this year Alps HOST has over 100 positive ratings and zero negatives. But what was most impressive was the consistency in the reviews: great and rapid customer support, superb uptime, excellent technical support – but zero spam tolerance.

Vista gives Alps HOST a 99.98% uptime, further backing up clients review. It does get worse on Web Host Directory where almost all 41 reviews rated their Alps HOST experience as 4 out of 4, or A+.

Not Flawless

But Alps HOST is not without its share of negatives. Management tends to exaggerate information on their website. At one point they listed being in business since 2004, but a check with WhoIs shows a website creation date of February 2005.

Another alarming watch point is that while the company claims to be in Germany, their servers return a US base location. Further checking with NIC confirmed a US based company. While we consider it normal to be located in a different country than your servers, one would prefer to know from the management and not some watch dog group.

Top Ratings

Finally, while we cannot deny that Alps HOST is indeed a superb, or even Google like webhosting company, we ask the management to be more transparent with technical and logistical information. We give Alps HOST a 4 star rating.

Overall rating: 4/5

One of the oldest web hosting services online is QWK.net, a privately owned webhost located in Boise, Idaho and has been in the hosting business since early 1998. They have provided solid linux hosting in a secured environment to tons of webmasters. Apart from a few PR glitches years ago, they have done very well as a top hosting service.

Excellent, but not so cheap service

QWK.net has five hosting solutions, three of which are considered Budget plans, costing less than $14.95. The others are more expensive. Budget plan for most webmasters means under $5. Yet this has not been enough to stop the tons of webmasters from buying QWK.net services. Their support and service has a lot to do with that.

QWK.net’s Budget plans come with standard features and bandwidth. They have since increased their web space to 100mb baseline to 1GB for the highest of the three budget plans.

First Class, Rapid Customer Service

Support at QWK.net is quick and responsive. They provide 24/7 email, office-hour phone support, and an emergency toll-free phone number. QWK.net’s support department is renown as courteous and knowledgeable. Most webmasters, even those who complained, could not help but state how satisfied they were with the QWK support.

Security and Servers

QWK provides a stable network with dual OC-48 connection and they back it up with a 99.9% Uptime Guarantee and a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. Or so they write on their website. However, Vista and Web Host Directory rank them a bit higher for uptime, 99.92%, and gave them an “A” for secured servers.

Qwk average uptime is 99.992% with total 78528 successful and 6 failed checks, Vista states in report monitored since 2006-01-29.

One may note that QWK.net shows little favoritism when it comes to its security. In 2006, QWK.net claiming the possibility of “security” risk, closed the account of one of its largest customers, Tiffy, amidst an outstretched battle on nudity and coding security issue.

Among The Top 10

Most host review companies rank Qwk in the top 10 web hosting companies. And a few even place it in the top five aside Godaddy and Rackspace. In the words of one review “QWk Budget plans offer only the standard features, … support and network more than make up for it.”

This many reviews continue to highlight, and users prefer a solid host even if they must pay a bit more. We proudly give Qwk a five star.

Overall rating: 5/5

Superbhosting.net offers three basic hosting plans for customers. They offer their Blog Hosting starting at $2.50 a month, their Unix Hosting starting at $6.50 a month and their Windows Hosting starting at $8.50 a month. They also offer what they call Universal Web Hosting which starts at $6.50 a month, and they have what they call and infinity plan which allows you to get unlimited traffic. This last plan is a complete web hosting solution that is intended for any type of customer, novice thru professional.

Superbhosting.net also offers several dedicated server plans that start out at $59 and go up to $199 a month. If you go on their site and look at their plans and don’t find one that really fits your need they also offer custom hosting plans. They can customize a shared hosting plan and/or a dedicated server plan to fit your needs. You can choose a monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly, 1 year, or 2 year billing cycle.
Advantages of Superbhosting.net are the hosting plans themselves. I find that they offer really flexible plans for a flexible price.

The Blog plan is great for anyone with a blog or a small website. It starts at $2.50 a month and it is primarily designed for Wordpress blogs. Superbhosting.net also offers a 30 day money back guarantee for all shared hosting plans. All shared hosting plans have no setup fee if you choose a 1 year or 2 year prepaid billing cycle. They offer a live sales chat, which is great so you can ask all the questions you need before deciding to sign up. Their knowledgebase, online wiki, is extremely helpful if you have doubts when already setup with a plan. They also have a support ticket system along with dedicated phone numbers to provide, what they say, 24×7x365 customer support.

Some of the things about Superbhosting.net that stand out to be problematic is their infinity plan. They offer unlimited traffic with this plan as a way to attract more customers. This can turn out to be problematic if they are overloaded with traffic from different websites they are hosting. Other than this everyone seems to be extremely happy with the service this web hosting company provides.

With different hosting plans, and manageable hosting rates Superbhosting.net is among the leaders in hosting. Incorporating a blog hosting plan is brilliant, since so many people have blogs because of their popularity. No doubt, Superbhosting.net is truly superb.

Overall rating: 4.5/5

Since its inception in 2001, HostForWeb.com has provided Linux shared hosting, dedicated servers, collocation and reseller based hosting accounts to webmasters all over the world. But after trumping seven years, has HostForWeb.com won the trust of its large customer base?

Inside The Core of a Data Center

Located in the carrier-neutral Equinix Chicago Data Center, HostForWeb, Inc. has access to many major carriers in Chicago without the need for local loop circuits. This closeness and in-house presence gives it the added advantage of 100% up time, being able to switch without a second of downtime among AAPT, Adelphia , Ameritech , Asia Global Crossing , AT&T, etc.
This attracts both small and large customers to HostForWeb and probably explains why they are ranked #78 among popular know web host.

No Thumbs Up From the Small Guys

But this popularity may not be shared among all of HostForWeb customers. Four years of voting and reviews from Vista International, revealed that they were more inclined to provide superb services to larger clients who bought reseller or dedicated hosting packages. And while they boated of preferential treatment, small or regular hosting accounts were not so happy.

Several clients complained of slow response to their problems. One client was told to upgrade to “dedicated” if they wanted more access to support.

But HostForWeb may have taken notice and have improved their outlook. This year so far they have received 32 positive reviews and only 7 negative reviews.

Kissing Down to the Small User

The turn around is also reflective in their new price tag of $4.50 for the starter account, down from $19.99 a year ago. And although one may argue that they need to be competitive, they are popular in the Chicago area not care, if they choose.

HostForWeb is also benefiting from continued management changes and training. Seven years is a long time to come to roost on a package tailored for customers of all walks of life, and in my hosting book, they are doing that this year.

On a Path to Greatness

Despite the glamour and the strength, HostForWeb still has far to go to convince the webmaster community that it is a reliable and fair partner. A partner that will provide valuable service and support. We can recommend them as a solid host who is making the correct strides, even though at a pace we would prefer to be faster.

We rate HostForWeb.com at 3 stars.

Overall rating: 3/5

It is amazing how good news travel slow. It took me quite awhile to learn about MochaHost. Here is why I consider MochaHost as great news for webmasters. MochaHost is located in the heart of Silicon Valley (San Jose, California), and provides web hosting, and tons of other complementary services. These services include web design, E-commerce, and Internet promotion services.

MochaHost’s plans tailor all hosting needs - from personal use, small businesses, to sophisticated E-commerce sites with huge requirements for bandwidth and disk space. But these are not the reason why I am thumbing up for them.

Award Winning Services

MochaHost has been the recipient of HostReview.com’s Top 10 Budget Host Award Feb 2006, is listed as one o f CNET’s Most Popular Hosts, a Top 25 Host March 2006 of RateMyHost.com, the Web Design Award Oct 2005 from DesignFirms.org, and one of FindMyHost.com’s E-commerce Guaranteed Approved Hosts.

So if all the bragging rights of top brass critics carry weight then we can celebrate. But just before rushing in, let’s see what the users say about this award winning host.

Users Find Its’ Good Enough

On February 8, 2007 a hosting survey and test service, HosTest, completed a four week study of the customer service provided by over 50 hosting companies throughout the US. MochaHost scored #1. They received an excellent score on the response quality part of the test and answered all e-mail support requests with an average response time of 24 minutes!

So far this year there have been 233 positive votes for Mochahost and 19 negative, placing MochaHost in the number for spot for overall hosting nationwide.

But MochaHost also satisfied affiliate users and staff members. A recent report on their affiliate program gave them a 70% grade but ranked them number 3 nationwide for best affiliate program.
And staff members listed it as an “excellent” place work.

Hosting Options

You can land a hosting account from about $4 per month. The largest package costs about $11. But MochaHost can take your hosting a bit further than most companies will. They offer a complete solution tailored to your budget including hosting, design and website promo.

Mochahost.com average uptime is 99.995% with total 75906 successful and 4 failed checks, monitored since 2006-02-28.

The Black Spot

MochaHost recently lost some assets in a lawsuit and also lost some of its staff in a company split. We give them a 4 Star with reservation as it remains to see what impact this will have on MochaHost.

Overall rating: 4/5