Ranks #1, because is one of the best hosting companies we have ever reviewed. If IX Web Hosting keeps up the good work, we will consider moving our website to their servers.

IX Web Hosting has made a remarkable name for itself since its inception in 1999. Boasting their own data center, a highly professional website and very attractive hosting plans, they have managed to be added to the short list of companies that Best Host Reviews is reviewing. Over the course of our review of IX Web Hosting, a period of many months, they continuously improved their performance, reliability and customer service, resulting in extremely quick loading websites and high customer satisfaction.

Reliability
During our extensive hosting experience with IX Web Hosting, we have had hardly any server outages. It would be a lie to say none of our test accounts have never been down - however, the uptime track record is impressive. The question is not IF downtime happens, the question is how often it happens and how quickly your hosting company can resolve the problem, and prevent it in the future. Our overall reliability experience with IX Web Hosting is positive. IX Web Hosting employs diesel backup generators, tested weekly, to ensure that no downtime is encountered over power issues. They also perform routine upgrades to their infrastructure, and do so in as unobtrusive a way as possible, which is a plus.

Price Value
IX Web Hosting, as with all of the hosts we review, are in the shared hosting market, one in which competition is fierce, and prices can only go so low. As a consequence, you tend to get a great deal for your money and IX Web Hosting is definitely competitive in this respect. They offer free site builder software, a free shopping cart, a wonderful customer control panel, and of course, great prices. Their billing cycles run from quarterly and semi-annual to 1 and 2-year billing cycles, on all plans. The longer the billing cycle, the higher the discount that is offered. On top of this, customer support well-covered: 24/7 phone support, a LiveChat interface and a snappy ticketing system make problem resolution painless

  Ranks #2, because Host Excellence is clearly a premier player in the shared hosting market. They are definitely a good choice, and we don’t hesitate in recommending them.

Host Excellence has been in business for several years and with their own data center and customer support office, Host Excellence has been constantly improving the performance of its services and quality of its support. Having recently updated their web site with more aggressive hosting plans and prices, Host Excellence has really started putting the heat on the competition. Their generous selection of hosting plans, coupled with superb service and network reliability, have resulted in fast loading web sites and high customer retention.

Reliability
Host Excellence has an impressive track record when it comes to the stability and dependability of their services. Acknowledging that reliability is in the interests of everyone involved, they have gone to great lengths to ensure that problems are few and far between. Their private data center is a testament to this principle. Backup power facilities, fault-tolerant systems and 24/7 on-site administrative staff make Host Excellence a good choice for anyone.

Price Value
If you’re looking for a great deal on web hosting services, look no further. Being a customer-oriented business, Host Excellence puts a lot of effort into offering their customers as much bang for the buck as you can get in shared hosting, providing a great selection of services and payment options, not to mention a noteworthy level of customer support, the value of which is something that cannot be easily expressed. They provide you with the tools needed to build your website, setup an ecommerce store, manage your databases and a great deal more, all at a wonderful price.

  Ranks #3, because their competative prices and their reliability.

Dot5 Hosting has quickly risen from relative obscurity to a top player, hosting thousands of customers at the iPowerweb data center (with whom they are a "Power Partner"). Their website is crisp and professional, and offers a wide range of bonus features on all accounts, including web templates, bulletin board and ecommerce software, and multimedia streaming support.

Reliability
We had a few hiccups during our time with Dot5, but nothing serious. Sometimes there were delays in the load times of PHP content, which became an off and on occurrence. The problem cleared up after some time and was not apparent throughout the rest of the test. That’s pretty good, being that when a problem like that develops, it is seldom resolved. Not many hosts are willing to put in the effort necessary to reduce server load once a problem with it develops. This is an indication of Dot5’s commitment to resolve even the more difficult issues that arise.

Price Value
Dot5 offers free domain registrations with its 1 and 2 year billing cycles and has no setup fee on any account or billing cycle. Not bad. For only $4.95 per month, Dot5 allows you to manage up to 6 domains on one account. With 200 GB space and 2000 GB monthly transfer shared between them, it's great value even if you only need to host a single domain. Their base package gives you all the features required to host your personal website or small business site and provides all of the space and flexibility you need to expand. Their plans include a fully-equipped Marketing Centre, a Web Site Creator, as many Shopping Carts as you need, a Search Engine Submitter, Search Engine Submitter Reports, a Keyword and Meta-Tag Generator, a Website Link Checker, and $50 Overture credit. All of this, at the price they offer, is a genuine deal.

  Ranks #4, because Overall, Vistapages is a great choice for your web hosting provider.

Vistapages has been providing web hosting services to customers since early 2004 and are well known for their amazing inexpensive web hosting plan called "VistaDeal" -- It sure is a deal! Let me tell you why! They only have 1 web hosting package, convientently called the "VistaDeal" shared hosting plan. With 350 GB of web storage and 3000 GB of data transfer, for only $6.95 per month, you'll never have to worry about being restrained on disk and transfer limitations or worry about breaking your wallet!

Reliability
The VistaDeal comes fully featured with PHP4/PHP5, CGI/Perl, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL to just name a few. You'll also enjoy the ability to host up to 16 domain names with one account, make use of unlimited e-mail accounts, parked domains, mailing lists, sub-domains and tons more! It's incredible at how much Vistapages gives away with just this one plan verses other hosting companies entire product line put together! Vistapages also throws in several dozen one-click, auto-install scripts, such as mailing list managers, content management systems, blogs, photo galleries and more, not to mention a free site builder for those of you who do not know how to build a web site.

Price Value
Vistapages' VistaDeal package is very affordable. The pricing break down is simple, they have 3 payment terms, month-to-month, yearly and 2-year prepaid plans. With their 2 year plan, you'll be able to get in a $6.95 per month with free setup, their 1 year plan is $7.95 per month with free setup and their month-to-month plan is $15.95 per month plus a $20 setup fee. Their service comes with an unconditional 30-day money back guarantee!

  Ranks #5, because BlueHost is an excellent choice, especially for customers who place a premium on performance and reliability.

BlueHost was founded in 1996 and is known for its inexpensive hosting plans and great performance. They are one of the larger hosting companies out there and provide customers with large amounts of web space and bandwidth, making their hosting solution a valuable commodity. Additionally, they offer several free script plug-ins such as, chat, blogs, polls, web auctions and bulletin boards. Supporting multiple features like, CGI, PHP, Perl, Front Page, MySQL Databases, ecommerce tools with a free shopping cart and the ability to track website traffic, BlueHost makes an all-in-one deal.

Reliability
BlueHost, during our review of their services, proved to have performance and reliability on par with the best shared hosts out there. They are conscious of not overloading their infrastructure, and of staying ahead of the load-curve by constantly expanding their data center. This factor stood out above all others and if performance is a paramount concern, BlueHost is definitely worth a look. We only experienced a few technical issues, all of which were resolved within a reasonable amount of time.

Price Value
Despite Bluehost’s great features, or perhaps on account of them, they do cost a little more than the other companies on this list to host with. If you prepay for 24 months, you do get the $30 set up fee waived and only pay an average of $6.95 per mo. BlueHost only offers Linux hosting. If you need Windows hosting, such as for ASP.NET or Microsoft data bases, you won’t be able to host with BlueHost. Overall, their hosting plan is a good bargain, especially for the performance and reliability they have achieved.

  Ranks #6, because Overall, AN Hosting left us with a good impression. Although not perfect enough to rank higher on our chart, they nonetheless are a great choice.

AN Hosting has been around since 2001 and in that time, has challenged its competition at every turn. Evolving into a serious player in the shared hosting market, AN Hosting now operates out of 3 facilities in 2 countries, and shows no sign of slowing down.

Reliability
Like many of the hosts on this list, the level of AN Hosting’s reliability was evident over the course of the review. We found the responsiveness of their servers to be excellent and were hard pressed to find complaint with this aspect of their service. They have implemented a generator in case of power failure and perform regular backups, something that more hosts should do, but tend not to.

Price Value
AN Hosting prices their single hosting plan, The Mega Plan, at about the middle of the road for shared hosting, starting at $6.95 per month. For this, you get 250 gigs of web space, 2500 gigs per month of transfer, room for 10 hosted domain names (upgradeable to 20 for $3 more a month), a free domain registration, database access, a range of guarantees and much more. While the webspace and transfer provided may not exceed what their competitors are offering at comparable prices, it is worth noting that the features included with the plan are superb and in our opinion, more than compensate for the high but ordinary amount of web space and transfer included and in all fairness, none if any websites require more resources than this.

  Ranks #7, because Lunarpages is not bad at all. In addition to the quality of their services, they have shown a heart, offering free hosting accounts to all public schools in the Unites States.

Lunarpages serves as the web hosting division of Add2Net, Inc. Its staff and technical support team has established an impressive six year history in the web hosting industry. This is relatively long considering that most web hosting companies are fly-by-night operations and in all reality, you need a company that will always be around. Lunarpages has earned a reputation as a provider with superior customer support and a solid data center. Unlike most web hosting companies, you can always get through the phone line with Lunarpages. Also, the $6.95 monthly plan offers everything you need in order to make the presence of your business successful on the web.

Reliability
Lunarpages has a long track record of offering quality hosting, with reliability and support representing cornerstones of their corporate culture. We experienced very little in the way of problems there and were impressed with the responsiveness of their staff in addressing those issues that did arise. Overall, their reliability is good, very good compared to most hosts, especially shared hosts. This alone easily landed them on our top 10 chart.

Price Value
Lunarpages offers decent pricing on their web-hosting plans. For a mere $6.95 a month, you receive 250 GB of space and 2500 GB of traffic per month. They also offer a $21.95 web-hosting package, which sports unlimited storage and a phenomenal 3 terabytes of monthly transfer. For most users, the $6.95 plan, the Basic Hosting plan, is sufficient, but it’s great to see a shared host offering as robust a plan as their Business Hosting plan for those with exceptional needs. They also offer Windows hosting and even Virtual Private Servers. All of their plans offer at least one free domain name registration, database support, web software such as blogs, forums, and Fantastico. They are among the more pricey of hosts, but are also among the most generous.

  Ranks #8, because If you have great ambitions, a tight budget, and a dose of patience, 1&1 would make an excellent host, especially for those who are new to hosting and want a lot of toys to play with

1 & 1 is a big player in this industry and in so being, brings a great deal of momentum to the table, as well as inertia. Overall, we are happy with their services, especially the quality of their hosting itself and the range of features included with their hosting plans.

Reliability
The reliability of 1&1's hosting is great, as is the performance. There were only a couple of minor hiccups to experience and all were resolved quickly and automatically by 1&1. This is a strong point for 1&1 and a significant one. After all, of what use us unreliable hosting? Their scale is, most likely, a contributing factor here, offering them the experience necessary to stay ahead of developing issues. Whatever the cause, they did very well in this area.

Price Value
1&1 provides customers with hosting plans that start as low as $2.99 per month, which is dirt cheap, but which is also a slimmer hosting package than the rest of the hosts on our list offer as entry-level hosting plans, giving you 10 gigs of space and 300 gigs of traffic per month. The next level up, the 1&1 Home plan, moves up into the range of these plans and is competitive at $4.99 per month, offering 120 gigs of web space and 1,200 gigs of monthly transfer. Not too bad at all. Their plans include a host of features as well as marketing freebies such as vouchers for adCenter, AdWords, Yahoo and Cityseach, something not offered by other hosts on our list.

  Ranks #9, because iPowerWeb is definitely not a bad host. Bad hosts don’t make it onto Best Host Reviews. That being said, they do have room for improvement

iPowerWeb is a relatively recent addition to Best Host Review's Top 10. At first, we were sceptical of iPowerWeb’s generous offerings at such low prices. We’ve seen many hosts who offer seemingly unbelievable deals on hosting, until you try to use them for any serious period of time, only to discover that yes, you often do get what you pay for. We first reviewed iPowerWeb’s service last year. At that time we stopped evaluating them mid-stream on account of a few advertised features that had not, in any way, met our expectations. After keeping a close eye on them for awhile, we decided that they had improved considerably. We were right, as their current offerings have landed them in the #9 spot in our top 10.

Reliability
iPowerWeb has proven to be a pretty reliable host. We did experience a few brief periods of downtime and the occasional performance issue, but overall, it wasn’t bad. Only minor adjustments to the hosting environment were necessary to get all of the scripts we threw at them to work, which is good. They also utilize a diesel power backup generator, backups and optical backbones through multiple tier 1 providers, a definite plus.

Price Value
In terms of pricing and getting what you pay for, iPowerWeb is among the more generous shared hosts out there. They offer both Linux and Windows based hosting accounts, the former offering 200 gigs of web space and 2,000 gigs of transfer per month, the latter offering 100 gigs of web space and 1,000 gigs of transfer per month. Both plans provide for a free domain name registration, no setup fee with 12 and 24 month billing cycles and an enticing number of additional features, which include great marketing freebies such as $50 Advertising Credit for Yahoo! Search Marketing, $30 in Google AdWords Credits and a $100 Credit for Microsoft adCenter2. This is particularly unique and beneficial to those engaging in online commerce and marketing. This is a great value.

  Ranks #10, because If you need a lot of bang for your buck and have a need for databases and more exotic features like Ruby on Rails or Fantastico, HostMonster is definitely a wise choice.

HostMonster may be last on our list, but take that with a serious grain of salt. All of the hosting companies who have made our top 10 list are exceptional, such that ranking them can be difficult and HostMonster is no exception. Offering one single plan, which has been tailored to offer the most bang for the buck and to accommodate the widest range of clients, HostMonster has chosen to focus on the important factors while placing less of an emphasis on less pressing features.

Reliability
Like the rest of the hosts present in our top 10 chart, HostMonster pulls no punches when it comes to offering reliable services. Any host who has shown to be lacking in this respect does not make it onto this list. The performance we experienced with HostMonster was, of course, exceptional, only showing brief and relatively rare periods of slowness. We experienced no outages with HostMonster, which is noteworthy. In summary, the performance was pretty good, but the reliability was outstanding.

Price Value
Owing to their focus on one single hosting plan, and by virtue of how much they have packed into this plan, the value received exceeds the low cost involved in hosting with them. Their plan allows for 200 gigs of storage, 2,000 gigs of monthly transfer, unlimited hosted domains (which is unique and wonderful), a free domain name registration, database support (both MySQL and PostgreSQL), a slew of free and ready-to-go software solutions and multimedia streaming. You will be hard pressed to find another host who offers so much for so little.