I have recently begun placing clients with different hosting companies in an attempt to determine who is best. For a long time, I have used Aplus.net, so I will start with them.
Aplus.net is a great company - I have multiple accounts with them, their knowledge base is pretty extensive and they have both Windows and Linux servers.
Here is a quick synopsis of how I think they do:
Control Panel: Excellent, easy to use and extensive
Speed of server: Average, can be slow if you are running scripting.
Support: Excellent, got back to me within 15 minutes on the last incident.
Price: Above Average, nice discounts for paying a year at a time $7.95 per month if you pay annually on their Unix Business Class Plan
Other: For the beginner, the control panel provides a great interface that is very intuitive. I give Aplus.net an overall A minus.
I just picked up the next host for a blog: Dot5hosting.com. So far, the service has been great. I had an incident getting the nameservers to resolve and Dot5Suppott answered the ticket from their built in control panel ticket system within minutes. I am so far, very impressed.
Here is a quick synopsis of how I think they do:
Control Panel: Average, inexperienced webmasters may find it somewhat difficult to use
Speed of server: Above Average,works great with ecommerce.
Support: Excellent, got back to me within 5 minutes on the last incident.
Price: Excellent, unlimited bandwidth for $4.95/month if you pay annually. Custom Name servers for no extra charge.
HostGator has renouned service and pricing...I decided to give them a try with my latest e-commerce templates web store. They are also the preferred host for Build a Niche Store
and I tried to use several other hosts for BANS and could only get hostgator to work.
Control Panel: cPanel - easy
Speed of server: Above Average - everything in a massive php ecommerce app runs lightning speed
Support: Excellent, they have a great ticket system and have helped me out lots.
Price: Excellent, unlimited domain hosting for cheap!
