Web Hosting Directory: Finding the right web host.

This can take as long as finding a spouse (well maybe a bit less time that that). There are literally thousands of web hosts who offer services. Many are good, and many are bad. Its a matter of trial and error.

What to Look for in a host:
Support, phone or email. A money back guarantee for 30 days. Fast servers and good backbones for internet connections. Consistent Uptime and uptime guarantees. Dedicated IP address.

Our Pick for Low Budget Web Hosting:
We have experienced ICD Soft for a period of over 4 years. They are a low cost web host with amazing email support, our sites tested on ICD Soft , have gone down very few times if any. Their average uptime is over 99% as advertised. Very simple and easy to use web interface control panel, offers a Personal Plan with 5GB and 333MB of disk space and a Business Plan with 15GB traffic or 999MB of space. All plans are shared hosting on Unix. Suitable for start-ups, businesses and anyone looking to keep their costs down an receive high quality hosting services. Don't let the missing phone support fool you. Our emails and problems were generally answered and fixed within 5 minutes, less than the hold time trying to get a tech on the phone at other hosts. They even went as far as to update phpBB scripts to prevent their customers from being hacked. They even took the time to help analyze cgi scrip errors, most other hosts at this price range would not make the extra effort. We Highly Recommend them as a low budget host. You will not go wrong! ICD Soft

Our Picks for Midrange Web Hosting (It's a Tie):
OLM.net, is another great hosting service. The Sphera VDS Platform requires a bit more knowledge to use, they offer excellent phone support. OLM is one of the fastest servers we have seen which is great images and multimedia websites. Artists, Designers, Photographers and companies that deal with images should consider them. We were definitely blown away by their speed. If you have hosted a website and like the features of administering sites, then OLM.net cannot be beat. They also offer affordable Dedicated IP web hosting, which is a must for any website that has a Secure Server and those that want the extra benefits for their search engine rankings that come with having a dedicated IP.

If you are looking for a simple and easy to use host, then try one of the others mentioned here. Our one downfall was a 56 hour period, that's right, Fifty-Six hours, that the server went down and so did we, there was no back-up server to prevent this and keep us online. Their tech support, that we called for the 3 to 4 day downtime period, explained that Sphera themselves needed to fix the corruption. This was also on a recently updated (and even faster) machine. We are assuming that the Install of the new Sphera version was corrupt and caused a major problem, but as wee are not hands on, and in some cases felt ignored, and misinformed by unknowledgeable phone support techs (level 1). The way we see it is if our Hosts Home Page is up, then our site should be up. Despite this one period of downtime in 3 years that the server hosts our site, there were only a few rare 15 minute erratic restarts, they have remained online and super fast (Fastest we've ever seen!). Recommended for small businesses and any secure server websites on a low to midrange budget.

WestHost offers the Sphera VDS platform as well and the dedicated IP hosting. We have experienced no down time in our 8 months of hosting and the speeds are similar to OLM, super fast. We found WestHost to out due OLM with both phone support, help time and the quality of the responsiveness. But we found our Search Engine Ranking to be higher on OLM than on westhost. We can attribute this to algorithm changes, however no major algorithm updates happened nor were documented in any SEO forum during out ranking drops on out test websites. There were also no content changes to the website in question to give us a confirmed answer.

WestHost offers a variety of Sphera Hosted plans and all around excellent support.

Our Pick for High End Web Hosting

RCN.net offers Top Quality Phone and Email Support. You are paying for excellent support and you get excellent support. We never waited when contacting RCN. Sites on RCN.net are up over 99% of the time. We have not experienced any downtime.

Sites we test are monitored by Interseer.com, which sends a robot out as often as requested to monitor the status of any given website.

Finding a good web hosting service can take a bit of time. The major service providers are generally some of the best and safest. If your on a tight budget you should be careful and research the companies. One idea is to monitor the host, the only problem with this is that your site will never be on the same computer as theirs.