How much do you pay

My two-cents...

We operate several dedicated servers, several reseller accounts and a few regular accounts with Hostgator. we used to have accounts spread over 7 different hosting services, but eventually moved almost all of it to Hostgator.

The service and support as well as overall quality and pricing are excellent, above par. Of course occasionally you will come across a support tech who is having a bad day, or one who is just not knowledgeable enough, bu this happens everywhere. Just hang up and call back in or ask for another tech should that happen, but this kind of problem is extremely rare with HostGator, perhaps 1 in 20 calls...

Be careful what you actually sign up for. if you are trying to make a living on the internet I recommend you stay away from the standard web hosting and go with a reseller account.

Reseller accounts start out at $19.00 per month, but are true unlimited domain accounts.

Most standard accounts are not true domain accounts but rather allow you to have unlimited domains with each as a sub-domain or worse yet, simple sub-directories under your primary domain. You are simply pointing a domain name to a sub-domain or sub-directory. In general, these type of sites are viewed negatively by most search engines.

With hostGator you can get what is called a VPS Hosting account for as low as $20.00 and this is as close to a dedicated server as you can get without buying into a dedicated server. Additionally, you simply buy more resources as your site or sites grow, instead of having to move from one account to another.

As for the regular HostGator accounts, the lowest price, paid monthly is $8.95 per month paid monthly for the Hatchling Plan. Lower prices are available if you sign up for 1,2 or 3 years and pay annually. HOWEVER, this account is limited to 1 DOMAIN and NO add-on domains and NO domain Parking is allowed. They do allow unlimited SUB-DOMAINS.

$9.95 per month paid monthly for the Baby Plan will get you Unlimited domains, and unlimited ADD-ON Domains as well as Unlimited Parked Domains and unlimited sub-domains. But I believe all domains except the first are add-ons as sub-domains or sub-directories.

The primary difference between a reseller account and a standard account is you get a WHM control panel to manage domain accounts with. This is the same control panel used with VPS and Dedicated server accounts, for managing all aspects of a true Domain Management Account.

There are many services offering extremely inexpensive hosting that provide both good service and good support.

In my experience one of them is BlueHost. HOWEVER, they only offer addon domains. With them you get 1 domain account and all other domains are a sub-component of that domain and managed as add-on accounts, not with a true domain management program such as WHM.

With Bluehost ( and most like them) you have to sign up for a minimum 1 year and pay for a minimum 1 year in advance. But this gets you in for $4.95/month on a 1 year contract, and $3.95/month for 2 and 3 year contracts. But you have to pay in advance for each level.

Bluehost will give you a domain for free, but be careful here. You may not own it until your first hosting contract is completed.

We use both GoDaddy and Dotster for our domain registrations, have done so for years and years, and find both very good to work with. Dotster provides a simpler, easier to navigate website for managing your domains. with GoDaddy, you have to navigate a never ending path of sales pitches to get where you want to go.

With both you can get into a reseller account with them and buy domains for less, if you want to sell domain registration on your website.

Bottom line is that there is a lot more involved than just price. Service and Support are extremely important. Reliability is just as important.

Regardless of all that you want to go with someone who provides a standard cPanl/WHM (when applicable) user interface. This represents the vast majority of hosting control panels and if you ever want to move everything somewhere else. It is easy to move from one cPanel account on one hosting service to another cPanel account on another, as well as moving between servers on the same hosting service.

I guess this was a bit more than my two-cents worth, but its all good!

Hostgator hosting has a 1 cent coupon code that you can use to basically get the first month for free to try it out. Always check for coupon codes whenever you are buying domains/hosting.

This^^

I bought my first site through 1&1....

....the horror.....


*shudders*

I like GoDaddy as a registrar (although NameCheap is popular too), and Host Gator or Bluehost for hosting

Either hosting option + buying the domain name will cost about $100 a year

Yes I agree that Hostgator is the way to go. The price is reasonable but even better is their support. You can chat 24/7. I'm technically challenged and they have always helped even if it's in the middle of the night. In fact, once I was so mixed up that they asked for my phone number and called me right back to walk me through my problem.

But wherever you do go for hosting, it's a good idea to buy your own domain name from a different source. Some places like 1&1 offer a free domain (or at least they used to) but you lose it if you give up the hosting. You are really held hostage if your site takes off.

I absolutely agree.

Even though it says unlimited, there is absolutely a limit because of how much data usage you are using.

On HostGator after you have filled 250,000 inodes I believe, you will see a major decrease in load speed.

But, I have 80 domains hosted on 1 account.

If someone isn't making money by the time they have 80 domains.. they need to rethink what they are doing.