I believe below 2 news might give us a good reason.

First one is that Microsoft Announces the General Availability of SQL Server 2012 on 2 April, 2012. And the other is that one of its Gold Certification partner DiscountASP.NET announce Launche MSSQL 2012 Hosting service in both US & UK on 5 April, 2012. Just 3 days after this product was released to the marketing, it has been in the service list of a web host. This is really a good news for any ASP.NET developers who want to learn and practice the latest Microsoft technology. To be honest, It has been 8 days since Microsoft release MSSQL 2012, and I still haven’t seen any NON Microsoft Gold certification partner launched this service.

Besides accessing the new technology earlier than the other web hosts, Microsoft Gold certificated partner also receive comprehensive training from Microsoft to offer better service to asp.net customers.

If you need a ASP.NET hosting, don’t forget to check out Microsoft Gold Certificated Partners if possible.

If you only look at the list price, you will be cheated.

The Fact

Below is the snapshot of GoDaddy hosting service page:

Let’s look at its Deluxe hosting first, which includes 150GB space, Unlimited bandwidth, 500 Mail account, 25 MySQL database. The list price is $7.64/month, after 34% off discount, the lowest price will be $5.94/month.

Now, let’s look at the price of Bluehost in below. Their solution offer unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited MySQL Database,  and unlimited emailbox. The list price is $7.95/month ($6.95/mon for 2 years service term). But now, Bluehost is offering 50% off on their hosting package, which cut the price down to $3.95/month.

Surprising enough right. GoDaddy is much more expensive than Bluehost, not to say Bluehost allow for “Any time Money Back” and Godaddy only guarantee 30 days money back.

We just take Bluehost as an example here, actually, some other reputed web hosts such as WebHostingHub, HostGator, and Arvixe, they are all cheaper than GoDaddy.

What Goes Wrong

There is no secret. GoDaddy has lower list price. But since financial crisis in 2008, quite many web hosts have been promoting their service with big discount, some even up to 50% off, which makes their price lower than the traditional cheap hosting service providers.

So, sometimes, you should not just trust your intuition, above is a good cases, and more hosting coupon could be found from the industry.

I did have one domain registered with EIG iPower, and I have paid the fee 1 month ago, so i know there won’t be any reason I should be charged. I checked my emails, and found there is one email sent by EIG said that they failed to charge my account. And I see the domain listed there is expired in last year.

What’s up EIG!!!!

Bank told me that EIG might request for the fee again, so they recommend to cancel the credit card or I contact EIG and ask them not to charge my credit card again. As I was so disappointed about what EIG has done, I choose to cancel my credit card and ask for a new one.

If there is any recommendation I could make on EIG iPower, that would be avoid doing any business with them, take care of your credit card and ask your bank to confirm with you for any transaction with them. You could find a list of great web hosting as an alternative.

This is all about a  trend in the hosting industry: the future of web hosting is application hosting. This is extremely true when coming to Linux Shared Hosting.

Once upon a time, building a web site need very complex knowledge and only tech geeks could handle this. But now, with WordPress, everyone could easily bring a site online even for newbies. Besides WordPress, there are also many other CMS tool could be leverage, such as Drupal, Joomla, etc.

CMS tool, especially WordPress, has become the most popular way for  individuals freelancer and small business to build a site.

Now, let’s see what customer base shared web hosting targets at. As a low cost & managed hosting solution, shared hosting is not for  critical business site, it’s not for eCommerce, it’s exact for individuals and small business.

In my many talks with CEOs from hosting companies, they all express the important of showing how well their solutions could support those applications. Some web hosts even re-name their shared linux hosting package to WordPress Hosting, Drupal Hosting, etc. The only purpose is to attract the eye of their visitors or rank well on those keywords in search engine.

Let’s take Hostgator as an example. As we all know, Hostgator is a giant in hosting industry, now they offer hosting service for over 5 million domains. They has designed a WordPress Hosting page, Drupal Hosting page, and Joomla Hosting page. Actually, there is no different between those solution and their Hatchling hosting package.

As a web host, when you see this article, what action you might take in your marketing campaign?

Surprisingly, as I have never met this issue with Hostgator before. Live Chat is my favorite support channel, and I could always be connected with them within 1 minute before.

According to the data revealed in Hostgator official site, they offered hosting service for around 2 millions domains date back to the beginning of 2010, and now the number become 5 million. This is a very fast growing, and obviously brings a lot of pressure to their customer support team. I know they are hiring, but one question come to my mind that could they keep up with the growth of their business.

Recently, they upgraded the online chat system, this long waiting issue might result from this migration and could be just an episode. I will continue observe the situation, and temporary lower their rating to be B+ in our Hostgator Review until seeing big improvement.

Hopefully, Hostgator won’t be a victim of their own success, as they are one of my most respected web hosts in the industry.

Product testimonials (or review) have been considered as an effective way to generate sales, which is extremely true in web hosting industry. Unlike some other consumer products, people could see or touch it before purchasing, web hosting is a service fully sold online. Before buying, the main information a buyer could refer to are hosting service reviews from some professional editor or their customers.

So, reading testimonials from trusted resources is critical for people to make a right decision on buying. So, what are the right place?

No for Testimonials in the Sites Owned by Web Hosts

You might see customer testimonials from the official sites of some hosting companies, one good example is Greengeeks. Their testimonials page is flood with positive reviews. Surprisingly, there is no one complaint about their service. But this might make sense as this testimonials page is owned by Greengeeks, I don’t believe they would like to publish any negative review.

Let’s come to the news I have mentioned at the beginning, is there any different if the reviews are posted in a separated site which is owned by the hosting company. I don’t think so. It’s just another site where most of reviews (if we don’t say 100%) are positive.

Yes for Independent Hosting Review Sites

Independent hosting review sites are what we recommend to. Many web sites allow people to publish their hosting reviews, but unfortunately, most of those sites haven’t put effort to filter out spam reviews which make them as places for faithless web hosts  to dispraise competitors or praise their own.

So, what good independent hosting review sites we recommend?

HostUCan.com is definitely the best one I have known so far. People could review their web hosting service by providing their web site information and the review comments. Before the review is published, the editor in that site will verify whether the reviewer’s web site is or have been hosted by the service they are reviewing. If not, the review will be treated as spam review and be removed before publishing. This manual process introduce some efforts, but it really improve the quality of the reviews in that site.

What even nice is that they have done the data mining on the reviews, and you could find many valuable information on the web host profile pages, such as “Customer Distribution of a web host and the relevant satisfaction rate”, “Average score on price value, customer support, reliability, speed,  and ease of use”, “What kinds of web sites are hosted from their most happy customers”.

WebHostingStuff.com is another web site we would suggest where tons of customer reviews could be found. They require the reviewers to input their web site and share it in the site. This has been proven to be an effective way to avoid review spams. But compared with HostUCan.com, they haven’t done enough data mining.

The other 3 great hosting review sites are WebHostingGeeks.com, WebHostingSearch.com and Web-Hosting-Top.com. Each of them will do a review verification before publishing. But unfortunately, they accept the reviews without the reviewers’ site url, which means there are defectiveness of their review spam audit process, and people could easily cheat them and make their review data un-trusted.

“Throttling means that our proprietary CPU Throttling System has automatically tied your account to its own dedicated core temporarily to keep your account from dominating too much CPU time. Throttling for less than 600 seconds in any given hour will not usually negatively affect your site’s performance for visitors. In some extreme cases, our admins may suspend the account until the problem(s) is/are resolved or optimized.”

So, from above, you could see that:

• CPU Throttling is used to limit the CPU resource usage of each shared account
• Now, the threshold is set to be “600 seconds in any given hour”
• Once your application exceeds this CPU Throttling, your account will be suspended temporarily.

Why CPU Throttling

In a shared web hosting, all the accounts in one server are sharing the same CPU, Memory, Disk Space and the other hardware. If one account consumes too much resource, it’s inevitable to impact the benefit of the other accounts and sometime it even causes the whole server down.

So, certain level of protection should be in place to avoid a single account consumes too much resource. And this is how Bluehost CPU Throttling system comes from. They develop an application to monitor the CPU usage of each account, once an account exceeds the predefined threshold, a warning email will be sent. As their customer, you could find the tracking log and tuning tips from their official site to optimize the applications.

Bluehost has tested their system for many years, and it was formally announced by their founder Matt Heaton in 2010. Right now, this system could be licensed to the other web hosts at a very low fee.

What Practice the Other Web Hosts Follow

Besides deploying this CPU throttling system, the practices the other web hosts follow are very close.

They will monitor the overall CPU and Memory status of the server, once it comes to a risk level, system will send out a warning email to their server administrators. Their staffs start investigating on the issue and find out which account cause the problem then suspend it.

Which One is Better?

So, from above, you could see that Throttling is always there. Bluehost monitor the system at account level, and the others monitor it at server level. But which one is better?

Personally, we feel CPU throttling is the future of Shared web hosting. Just like VPS, Cloud or Dedicated Hosting, you are allocated with the dedicated resource (such as CPU, Memory, Disk Space and etc) you have purchased, shared hosting should get the same level of protection, and Bluehost CPU Throttling is definitely a better solution now.

You might can “steal” some resource when using the service from the other web hosts, but this won’t last too long, your account will be suspended sooner or later. And think about this issue at the different angle, do you want to live in a community where your neighbors could easily steal your resource? If not, then go with Bluehost, where you get protected.

To know more about Bluehost, please don’t forget to check out our comprehensive Bluehost Review.

Shared hosting is the most popular type of hosting and will suit the majority of both small business and personal needs. As the word implies, shared web hostingmeans that you are sharing one server (CPU time, memory, OS, applications, etc) with some other clients of your hosting server providers, and the service provider will take the responsibility to ensure uptime, security and functionality.

Advantage

• Low Cost. As you share the resource with the other account, the price could be much lower than the other hosting type.
• Ease to Use. You have no need to be skilled in server management when using a shared hosting. Normally your web host will offer a free control panel (such as cPanel, Plesk, etc),with which you could easily manage email, file, database, installing Blog and more.
• Better customer support. As shared hosting is the most profitable and competitive hosting product, and  web host str responsible for server maintenance, most of shared hosting service provider will strive to offer better support to their customers to build reputation in the industry.

Disadvantage

• Server Restriction. In shared hosting, normally you are not allowed to install new software or change the server level setting. Some of web host might also disable the shell access to the server (you cannot telnet to the server, but could ftp file). So, before purchasing, you need to make sure the web hosts offer the features are required by your web site, which might include script support, database, and some web server setting (for example, Apache URL Rewrite module, etc).
• Resource Constraints. Most of shared hosting will limit the consumption of CPU or Memory resource, so when your site exceed the threshold they have configured, your account might be suspended.
• Security Risk. As you share the server with the other accounts, there might be some security risk if your web hosts haven’t setup the environment properly.

When You Should Consider Shared Web Hosting

Shared hosting is perfect for personal site, blog, small business site or development environment. But in below case, we don’t recommend shared hosting

• Your site need a memory higher than 128MB
• Daily traffic over 1000 page view, or Daily Unique IP visit is 300+
• Need to customize the server environment and install something shared hosting don’t support normally.
• Your site contain business critical data and need the site to be highly secured.

In above case, you should go with VPS, Cloud or Dedicated Server in which you get more control on the server, but in the other hand, those are much more expensive and you need to be more skilled to maintain the servers.