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Finding a reliable web hosting company for your website isn't always a straight forward process. There are thousands of web hosting companies out there and each one claims to be the best. Some offer their plans at very cheap prices while others pile up a ton of freebies to attract you. Some have been in the business for a decade while some just came up recently.

This website points to you some very stable and reliable web hosts to make your search easier. It is important to understand that good service comes at a cost and the cheapest service usually isn't the best available. I list web hosts that provide great hosting and an excellent customer support. Cost is definitely important but only as long as it doesn't compromise on the quality of hosting. Serious personal websites as well as business websites (small or large) can't afford pathetic service or downtimes.

Reliable Web Hosts

• Hostgator - plans starting at $4.95/month (they are on promo now, so the rates are lesser)
• Arvixe - plans starting at $4/month

If you are looking for a host for a business website, then you can also consider:

• Inmotion Hosting - business plans starting at $5.95/month

How did I find these web hosts?

I personally have websites hosted on both Hostgator and Arvixe and I must say they are both excellent. I know folks who use Inmotion Hosting and they find it great too. I arrived at these after a great deal of research - I asked for experiences from a lot of friends, colleagues and webmasters in the computer industry. Some of the hosts on my initial list (primarily the ones offering hosting for $2.xx or less per month, popular on many "ranking" websites) were eliminated after I learnt more about them.

Here is what you will get from these web hosts:

Quality hosting:

Needless to say, this is the most important thing you should expect from a web hosting company. I wanted the hosting to be good first and any freebies or discounts on offer were only secondary. Think about it: if we go shopping for shoes, we don't exactly buy uncomfortable shoes just because the vendor throws in a free pair of socks.

The entire process from signing up to billing to getting my account information necessary to setup my website is a breeze with the above hosts. The servers are fast so whenever someone visits your website, it doesn't take ages for your website to load. Plus there is excellent uptime. Each of the host claims at least 99.95%. I have uptime monitors setup to monitor my websites and according to their reports, the uptime claims certainly seem to be true.

Support:

You can phone, email or submit a ticket (from within your web hosting account) whenever you need support. Unlike some hosts, I found that the answers to my questions were always useful and they were fast. The average response time I got for my tickets has been around 1 hour but none of the tickets I raised have been technical in nature (because I haven't experienced any technical problems at all). Technical tickets that are high priority usually receive responses earlier.

Ability to upgrade to higher plans:

Many new webmasters might not consider this important but I think most webmasters who dream of having a good deal of visitors should look out for this. All websites start small with a handful of visitors but over time, your website could become popular and you might have a lot of visitors. If such ever becomes the case (and it is not rare), then you should be able to move your website to a higher hosting plan with more resources. If your web host only has one type of plan (shared hosting) and doesn't offer other forms of hosting like VPS, semi-dedicated, dedicated and cloud hosting, then you might have to move to a different host once your website outgrows your shared hosting plan limits. This could involve unnecessary hassles of taking backups of your files and data from your existing web host and then transferring them to a new host. On the other hand, if your existing web host supports higher plans, they'd be happy to move you to a higher plan when your website requires it. All the web hosts above have higher hosting plans.

cPanel:

or in other words, the control panel of your web hosting account. cPanel is an industry standard for web hosting. Nevertheless, some web hosts (even big and popular ones) have their own proprietary control panels that are sometimes not so intuitive or have been intentionally modified so as to dissuade users from using them in a certain way. This brings about limitations in the way you manage and run your websites. It is always better if your host provides you with a popular and widely used panel like cPanel. Inmotion Hosting doesn't provide cPanel but I still list them because their hosting is top notch will an excellent customer support and they've been especially good for small and medium businesses.

Unlimited disk space:

This is both a good feature as well as a bad one. When a web host says they offer unlimited disk space it is necessary to understand that the space isn't necessarily unlimited. In fact it definitely is not. It means a lot of space as can be realistically expected to be used by average as well as slightly-above-average websites. In other words, most normal websites that you would see would have very limited disk space requirements, something to the tune of a couple of GBs (maximum, because most just need a couple hundred MBs). The web hosts bank on this fact and use the word 'unlimited' in their plans because we all like having 'unlimited' something, don't we?

So yep, as long as you are planning to create a website and grow it slowly and naturally, you will not have any problems with "unlimited hosting" but if you are planning to sign up for a web hosting account and upload a few thousand large videos into your unlimited account, you will have a problem.

No upselling/spamming:

This might not be everyone's grouse but I strictly don't like it when companies try to shove a cart load of products on your face as soon as you buy one of their products in an attempt to get you buying a lot of their other products. Offer or promotional mails once in a while are fine (and I welcome them) but an avalanche is definitely something I despise. I slashed off a few of the hosting companies from my list once I learned that they were masters at spamming.

Reasonable price:

While $2.95 or less per month sounds alluring, it is not so much a sweet deal when you find out that it comes at a price (a different kind of price): servers are crammed with users, your websites crawl, your website keeps going down every week or it takes hours to get replies to your support tickets. I am always happy to pay a few dollars more a month in order to have a peace of mind and a good service. It is like avoiding one cup of coffee a month and using it for your hosting, now how bad is that? 

Let's compare some features:

Hosting Provider	Hostgator Visit Host (On promo now)		Arvixe Visit Host		Inmotion Visit Host
Plan Name	Baby	Hatchling	Personal	Personal Pro	Value Basic	Launch
Pricing options	Non-promo prices $4.95/mon - 3 years $5.95/mon - 2 years $6.95/mon - 1 year $8.95 monthly	Non-promo prices $7.95/mon - 3 years $8.95/mon - 2 years $9.95/mon - 1 year $9.95 monthly	$4.00/mon - 2 years $5.00/mon - 1 year $6.00/mon - 6 months $7.00/monthly	$7.00/mon - 2 years $8.00/mon - 1 year $9.00/mon - 6 months $10.00/monthly	$4.00/mon - 2 years	$5.95/mon - 2 years $6.95/mon - 1 year
Space	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	150 GB	Unlimited
Bandwidth	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	1500 GB	Unlimited
Domains	1	Unlimited	6	Unlimited	1	2
Subdomains	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	0	25
Email Accounts	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Yes	3 Webmails
FTP Accounts	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	1	1000
Control Panel	cPanel	cPanel	cPanel	cPanel	Proprietary	Proprietary
Free Domain						(with privacy included)
Free SiteBuilder
Shared SSL
MySQL Databases	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	1	2
phpAdmin Access
Custom Error Pages
Web Stats
Backup	Weekly	Weekly	Daily R1 Soft	Daily R1 Soft	Weekly	Daily
Support Options	24x7 Ticket, Phone	24x7 Ticket, Phone	24x7 Ticket, Phone	24x7 Ticket, Phone	24x7 Ticket, Phone	24x7 Ticket, Toll Free phone support
Advertising Credits	Google Adwords $100 credits*	Google Adwords $100 credits *
Video Tutorials
Money Back	45 days	45 days	60 days	60 days	30 days	90 days
	Visit Hostgator		Visit Arvixe		Visit Inmotion

*Google Advertising requires that you be a resident of US or Canada in order to be able to use the voucher. It is not valid for international customers.

So you can compare the features. When it comes to the most important features they are all more or less the same. Inmotion puts restrictions on some of its features. As long as your requirements are within those limits, you can go for them because they are also an excellent host.

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This is my new website that I started to help out my fellow and other webmasters in searching for a good web host. I will be adding tutorials for various aspects of web hosting here, but since I have a day job, please bear with me if I am slow.