Hostway

Long long ago, when "Party like it's 1999" was something you had not yet done, there were fewer options in web hosting. One such choice was Hostway. At the time, they were a fairly priced, and offered decent services. As the years passed by, more and more companies cropped up in the world of hosting, offering better deals and more service for less money. Hostway apparently never noticed this, or didn't care to compete. In their base plan, they offer a whopping five POP3 accounts (unlimited aliases however), some custom-rolled but highly limited blog software, 150MB of storage and a qualified 10GB of transfer, which is actually capped at 330MB per day. PHP is an extra charge, although you may run CGIs if you choose. PHP is an extra $5 per month.

There are more expensive plans that have more included features, but they're far from cost effective solutions.

Bottom lines:

Pros:

• No charge for transferring domains to Hostway's Registrar service
• Free Frontpage (is this really a bonus?)

Cons:

• $8.95 per month
• $39.95 setup fee
• $5 per month charge for web-stats.
• Must pay yearly, no quarterly or monthly options
• No PHP ($4.95 per month extra)
• 330MB daily transfer cap
• Excessively limited feature set
• Poor Customer Service
• Total of $147.35 for first year, $107.40 after

Zero Electrons

Cedant

Cedant used to be great. They would give a free month trial, you got FTP and shell access, decent disk space and transfer, and the support was very fast. Somewhere in 2000, people were abusing the free trial, and shell access, and that went. The plans grew in price, but never in features. The base plan is $9.95 a month, and that gets you 50MB of storage, 1GB of transfer, 5 email addresses, and a domain name. For another $5 a month, your storage goes up by fifteen fold to 750MB, transfer goes up to 50GB, and you get 100 email addresses. This used to be the base plan years ago, but is now $14.95.

Bottom lines:

Pros:

• Free Domain Name
• Decent support
• No setup fee
• Ability to pay on a monthly cycle
• Bandwidth is not pro-rated per day
• Unlimited subdomains
• 30 Money Back Guarantee

Cons:

• Price/feature ratio is poor
• Only 1 FTP login
• No PHP, SQL, or scripting of any kind
• No statistics of any kind
• No shell access
• No logs of any kind
• Severely limited storage/transfer

One Electron

TotalChoiceHosting

TCH is a great host. I used them for well over a year, and was very happy with them. The support staff and forums are very quick, helpful, and quote pleasant. The management is very communicative to customers about happenings with the company, and there are the occasional free upgrades to services, features, software for all customers across the board. The prices are extremely competitive, and the servers are snappy. The only real downsides are that there's no shell access, which may not be an issue for many people, and the upgrade paths are somewhat limited. The plans are great for what you get, but once you start to exceed the Expert or Platinum plans, the only option is to either move or get a dedicated server. And you'll hate to leave them if you can, they're just a really great bunch of people.

Bottom lines:

Pros:

• Great prices
• Monthly billing/quarterly/yearly
• No setup fees
• Unlimited subdomains
• PHP with unlimited SQL access
• Unlimited email/ftp accounts
• Feature-rich CPanel
• Free shared SSL
• Stats with raw-logs available
• Fast, responsive, knowledgable support
• Automated backups (called Snapshots)
• No regulation of content (aside from banning illegal content)

Cons:

• Limited upgrade potential for larger sites
• No shell access
• Can take up to 12 hours to activate account (usually much less)
• No referral program

Three Electrons

Dreamhost

This is my current host, and really the best I've ever found. The only downside I've found is the payment options. They're lackign in that if you choose to go monthly, there's a setup fee of $49.95. This is waived if you go for the yearly billing, which I went with. Normally I prefer monthly billing for my personal convience in case I need to cancel or move, but I dislike setup fees more, and Dreamhost's features were so good I can't forsee moving any time soon. They have a 97 day money-back satisfaction guarantee, and I highly doubt you'll need it. The basic plan gives you 2.4GB of storage (yes, 2.4 gigabytes) and 120GB of transfer, 600 email accounts, 75 shell/ftp accounts, a Jabber server, three full domains and 15 subdomains, PHP 4 and 5, cron, a full shell, CGI, Ruby on Rails, a selection of built-in one-click-install software (scripts, blogging, etc), SSI, CVS, and more than I will bother to list. And they're always upgrading or adding something new. The staff is very fast, friendly, and the custom control panel is extremely intuitive. And there's a current sale where the level 2 plan has been suspended, and the level 3 plan's price cut to the level 2 price.

Bottom lines:

Pros:

• A huge, unbeatable set of features
• Fantastic price
• Rewards program
• Great staff
• Shell access
• Discount if you prepay 2 years
• No Setup fee for yearly prepays
• PHP4/5, Perl, Python, CGI, Ruby on Rails, more

Cons:

• Setup fee for monthly plan

Four Electrons