Justhost

Justhost is web hosting company with offices in United States of America, United Kingdom and Australia. Created in 2002, it have become popular in recent years. Offers shared and reseller hosting. Shared hosting plan comes with unlimited space, bandwidth, free domain name, PHP, MySQL, cPanel control panel, host unlimited domains on single account, FTP and many other features. This plan is good for personal website/blog hosting. Regular price is $6.95 monthly, currently on promotion – $3.45 monthly. The reseller hosting also comes with tons of features (all the features shared offers), plus free whm control panel, but depending on the chosen plan you get allocated disk space. Only platinum plan comes with unlimited disk space and bandwidth.

Justhost Support

Justhost offers live chat, tickets (e-mail) and phone support.

Overall Rating

Justhost is top rated host. My personal rating is 5/5. They have fast servers, offer tons of features and have lots of customers.

Bluehost is USA based company headquartered in Utah. It is one of the oldest web hosting companies, created in 1996. Bluehost have only one hosting plan and it is great for personal websites/blogs and small companies. On a Bluehost you can host unlimited sites, blogs or galleries, shopping carts and lots of other scripts. Account is perfectly setup so you can run wordpress, drupal, joomla or other cms – type script without any problems because PHP, MySQL and Apache web server is included. One-click installer for popular applications like the above mentioned is available, and you can access it via your account’s cPanel control panel. There are lots of other features including: FTP, Ruby On Rails, .htaccess support, streaming audio/video and others. If you do not have a domain, you can register one for free after you signup with Blue Host.

Rating

Bluehost is top hosting provider hosting more than 1000000 websites on their servers. Have received number of rewards and good reviews from users and hosting sites. They are recommended provider for your next web site online.

Hostgator is well known company in the hosting industry hosting more than 2,500,000 domains (at the time of writing this) with more than 200,000 clients. Founded in 2002 by Brent Oxley, based out of Houston, Texas, USA. Offers shared, reseller, virtual private servers and dedicated server hosting. Shared web hosting have three hosting plans: hatchling, baby and business. Shared plans have the following features: unlimited space, bandwidth, cPanel control panel, PHP, MySQL,  FTP,With Hatchling you can host only one domain and this is the cheapest plan – $4.95 (three years annual payment), while with baby and business you can host unlimited domains. The baby plan is the most popular on hostgator because the price not expensive ($7.95 monthly), and you can host as much as sites you need/want. For companies there is the business plan which includes free 1-800 toll-free number, free SSL certificate and a dedicated IP address. This plan is also the best for e-commerce websites. Prices for business plan start at $12.95 monthly. 5/5 for features, hosting plans and prices.

HostGator Support

Support gets 5/5. They respond fast, are nice and are very technically knowledgeable. In my 3 years hosting with them I have had minor probles (3-4) which all have been resolved within 30  minutes.

Overall Rating

Hostgator gets 5 out 5. They are really great company. I am happy with Hostgator and recommend them to anyone. You would not mistake if you choose Host Gator.

Web hosting control panels allow users to manage many aspects of their hosting account. Control panels do not require technical knowledge of setting up servers, configuring, or linux administration. Some of the features available at most of the panels are: create new databases, setup users and permissions, FTP accounts, access to statistics/logs, file managers, addon domains and much more. The most popular control panels are: cpanel, hsphere, directadmin, plesk, cortex, webmin and others. Most of them are commercial and propriety (except webmin is free and open-source). Most of the hosts offer cPanel to their customers, mostly because cPanel is simple to use, have a great interface with lots of features, it is one of the oldest panels and it is the most popular in the industry. Usually hosts do not charge their clients for cPanel. I personally have used cPanel numerous times and I can say that I got used to it and I really like it. Have tried other panels like Hsphere, they are good but cPanel is much better. To make it even more simple for their clients hosts offer Fantastico Cpanel addon tool for fast, simple one-click installation of popular web applications: wordpress (blogs), Joomla (Content Management System -CMS), Drupal – CMS, zencart – shopping cart, galleries and many other scripts. Fantastico sets up everything for you including databases, users/permissions and initial settings, however does not provide any help/support for the script installed.

Online Shopping cart software allows webmaster to build oline stores. Shopping carts software categorize products and/or services offered, allow the customer to collect products virtually in a cart and perform a checkout. Usually the checkout is done via special secure payment gateway (paypal or other), so customer financial data is not stored on shared hosting servers. Mostly because of this many online web stores were created. Other reason would be the free shopping carts. Magento for example is the best shopping cart, with many features including gateway for many credit cart payment processors (on the official site there are more than 300 payment modules available). Other popular shopping carts are Zencart and Oscommerce. All have many features and great community of users and developers. They are all written in PHP and require MySQL or other database system for storing data and customer information. Nowadays almost every hosts have PHP and MySQL support in their big list of features, but a good e-commerce host is one that offers great support, excellent uptime, dedicated IP address and SSL certificate. The best host and the best plans is the business plan from Hostgator. It also comes with cPanel to easily manage your websites. Other good hosts that offer these features are Ixwebhosting, Bluehost, Hostmonster, Dreamhost, Webhostingpad, Justhost and Hostnine.

MySQL Community Edition is free open-source relational database management system. It is the most popular in the hosting industry and it often comes in bundle with PHP, Apache web server in Linux hosting environment (LAMP setup). It is powerful database system, uses Structured Query Language for managing databases, insert data, selecting, updating records. Many popular web applications including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal use it for storing data and settings. Popular websites like Facebook, Wikipedia, Google use it too, so it is pretty much popular. As for mysql hosting I have not met a web hosting company that do not offer MySQL support on their servers. Most of the hosts support remote MySQL so you can access your databases remotely from other server or even from your home PC. Usually mysql management panel is integrated in the control panel (cpanel, hsphere, directadmin or others), with database tool and phpmyadmin. If you are not familiar with creating and seting databases to install some web software, you can use the one-click installers offered. Most top hosting providers have Fantastico or some other one-click installer tool.