HostMonster

HostMonster has been providing reliable hosting solutions to thousands of businesses and individuals since 1996. Their web hosting plan helps businesses and individuals get high-powered service at an extremely affordable price with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space and an unlimited number of add-on domains. All of the above makes your website ready to use as soon as you have signed up.

• Free Domain Forever & Free Website Builder
• UNLIMITED Hosting Space & Web Traffic
• Host UNLIMITED Domains on 1 Account
• Unlimited POP/Imap Email Accounts
• SSH, SSL, FTP, CGI, Ruby (RoR), Perl, PHP, MySQL
• 30-Day Money Back Guarantee

HostMonster offers a great web hosting product that is second to none. Their web hosting is reliable and secure. When it comes to the control panel it is easy to use and contains some great features. Nevertheless, their customer support and value for money are some of the best in the industry. HostMonster makes customer satisfaction a big deal. Therefore, they offer a 24/7 technical support with average hold times less than 3 minutes. Choosing HostMonster as your web hosting company means you will be making a good decision.

Control Panel

Hostmonster provides the industry standard cPanel control panel for administration of your web sites, so those who have used cPanel before will feel right at home here.
The panel can be configured for a large variety of different languages via a drop-down selection, so those for whom English is not their first language will most likely find their native language supported.
Besides the usual domain and website configuration options, the panel also provides access to a web-based file manager, an FTP manager and an easy to use page wizard, allowing even beginners to create professional looking web pages from a large variety of ready-made templates.

Scripting Support

Fantastico script support is available via the admin panel. For those not familiar with Fantastico, it allows the easy installation and upgrade of dozens of ready-made scripts, such as blogging packages, content management systems, forum software, e-commerce solutions, picture galleries etc.
For those that prefer to install their scripts manually, Hostmonster provides full support for all the major scripting languages, including PHP (4 and 5), Perl, Python, Ruby / Ruby on Rails, CGI and Java-Script.
Shell access (SSH), custom CRON jobs, .htaccess overrides and custom php.ini are also available for the power users out there.

Reliability

As you can probably guess from the infrastructure mentioned at the top of this review, you can expect excellent reliability from Hostmonster. In-fact, Hostmonster have a 99.9% uptime guarantee. We monitored our Hostmonster test site over a period of 3 months and during this time, we experienced absolutely no downtime, you cannot ask for better reliability than that.

Technical Support

If there is one area that can ruin an otherwise good web host, it is technical support, or rather, the lack of technical support. Thankfully, Hostmonster proved to be excellent in this regard.
Hostmonster has on on-line support center, where you can lodge support tickets or search / browse their knowledgebase. The breadth of the information in the knowledgebase often means you can solve your own problems or issues without ever having to lodge a support request.
If you do find you need to lodge a support request, we found the support staff to be prompt at replying and very knowledgeable on the subjects we enquired about.
For customers that prefer phone support, Hostmonster has a technical support phone number that is available 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. They also provide another support number for customers outside of the United States.

Conclusion

Hostmonster, in our opinion, is among the very best web hosting solutions currently available. They are solid, reliable, they have a support system that is responsive and knowledgeable, and the standard Hostmonster plan is feature packed and very affordable, what more could anyone want in a host?