Review of different hosting companies & services side by side with our continous testing/monitoring over website performance, customer feed backs and overall industry reputation. We host sample website and do necessary testing on some crucial features to ensure our recommendation is perfect.

Best VPS Hosting Under $10/mo

Budget vps under $10/mo

There're thousands of VPS hosting providers with tons of features. Normally it 's costly to get a vps server. However there're some kind of services prepared for limited budget purpose. Some service plans are even more affordable than tipical shared hosting. After some time's research, we compiled a list of the most affordable vps service that's under $10/mo. In case you're looking for such plan, you don't have to look anywhere else.

TOP VPS Hosting services under $10/mo

VPS Brand Datacenter Xen/OpenVZ RAM Hard Disk Bandwidth Pricing Official Site
VolumeDrive Pennsylvania OpenVZ 1GB 50GB 2TB $4.95/mo volumedrive.com
BurstNET Los Angeles
Chicago
Miami
OpenVZ 512MB 20GB 1TB $5.95/mo www.burst.net
DirectSpace Chicago
Los Angeles
OpenVZ 512MB 20GB 1TB $4/mo directspace.net
Hostigation Los Angeles Xen 256MB 25GB 1TB $4/mo hostigation.com
BudgetVM Los Angeles
Chicago
Dallas
Xen 123MB 5GB 125GB $3.95/mo www.budgetvm.com
RapidXen Chicago
Los Angeles
Xen 128MB 5GB Unlimited $7.49/mo rapidxen.net
2Host St. Louis
Atlanta
Xen 128MB 5GB 10000GB $4.49/mo www.2host.com
123Systems Dallas OpenVZ 128MB 5GB 250GB $3/mo 123systems.net
Crucial Paradigm Dallas Xen 128MB 15GB 120GB $6/mo www.crucialp.com
DMEHosting Denver OpenVZ
Xen
64MB
128MB
3GB
5GB
200GB
400GB
$6.95/mo
$9.95/mo
www.dmehosting.com
ECHO Servers Dallas OpenVZ 96MB 2GB 150GB $5.99/mo www.echoservers.com
HostGD Scranton OpenVZ 128MB
128MB
5GB
10GB
25GB
50GB
$4.95/mo
$9.95/mo
www.hostgd.com
Hosting Inside Taiwan XEN 256MB 10GB 250GB $8.75/mo www.hostinginside.com
Internet VPS Scranton OpenVZ 512MB 50GB Unlimited $9.99/mo www.internetvps.com
NeoSurge Chicago, Illinois Xen 128MB 5GB 200GB $6.95/mo www.neosurge.com
QuillHost Sacramento OpenVZ 256MB 40GB 400GB $7.99/mo www.quillhost.com
TurboVPS Texas
Indiana
OpenVZ
Xen
128MB 10GB 1000GB $7.49/mo turbovps.com
VPS4Less Germany OpenVZ 256MB 3GB 1000GB €4.75/mo vps4less.de

Notes for Cheap VPS server

The price looks great right? Especially they're located in different places in the world. If you have business in that area, you can check out them directly. The budget vps is perfect if you sign up for learning purpose. If you would like to put your live business project on the server, I think it's better to choose a upgrade plan since more resources can be allocated there. Always remember the popular saying "you get what you pay for". Since it only costs us several bucks, how much more we can expect?

Cheap VPS servers are provided as unmanaged with limited support. Means you need to take care of your vps server completely by yourself. It's pretty good if you're going to learn for server managing or test out projects via the least cost.

Custom VPS Hosting

custom vps hosting

VPS is perfect choice when our websites reach the shared server limitation. Normally we have to accept the default offers from server providers, in case we need more features we have to contact support to upgrade. What if we don't use that much and all those features in the plan? In that case we need a custom vps hosting plan and configure the server with our real requirements.

Custom VPS Server Advantages

With no doubt there're lots of benefits from a custom vps hosting. The best of the best is we can configure the server with our live requirements with no waste of server resource, this is resulted with the minimum cost for our budget. In this way, we can get the best server configuration to serve our website.

TOP Custom VPS Hosting Providers

Custom vps hosting is not popularly offered as the traditional hosting plans because the hosting company will have to deal with lots of technical stuff and management work etc. Even from the most well known hosting company, they would not will to offer such opportunity. Till present, the quality names with custom vps hosting service are myhosting and hostgator, and maybe the less well known name hostrightnow. Here let's check out their hosting features and compare which one is better to choose.

Myhosting – The largest internet service provider of Canada and the most well known hosting provider in that country. They myhosting offers quality and cheap hosting plans. Especially to their custom vps hosting service, it can be customized in detailed features such as server cores/RAM/IPs/control panel and many addon products. The low cost is not only referring to the free linux OS but also hyper-v windows server 2008! Another spotlight is we have the option to select what we would like to use the server for including options for small businesses, resellers and web developers.

Hostgator – One of the largest hosting providers who mainly focus on linux hosting plans. The hostgator custom vps hosting is 100% linux based. Although it's called custom vps, users do not have many options to customize. In short, it's more like they're offering multiple pre-configured vps server plans via a changeable bar.

Bluehost – Very famous hosting provider with full hosting solutions. Unlike any above, bluehost is cloud based for instant provisioning for server setup. The bluehost cloud vps servers are pretty scalable to meet any your website requirement. The best of the best is the management center is 100% mobile compatible so you can monitor and manage server anywhere with internet access!

To understand their offers more clearly, here's a simple table view about the service features(designed with default offer)

Brands Myhosting Hostgator Bluehost
Disk Space 20GB(linux) 30GB 30GB
25GB(windows)
Bandwidth 300GB 500GB 1000GB
RAM 512MB (linux) 768MB 2048MB
1024MB (windows)
Server OS Windows/Linux Linux Linux
Control panel Plesk($3/mo) Plesk cpanel
Cpanel($10/mo)
IPs 1 2 1
Pricing $15.95/mo $31.96/mo $14.99/mo
$44.95/mo
Promo Code MyhostingCouponVPS Default 20% off 50% off first month

As we see from the comparison, Myhosting is perfect choice no matter from server offers and pricing. Since myhosting is CA based hosting company, many people might think their service is not suitable for oversea business website. However, please note they have both CA and US datacenters. That means we can take the advantages of US networking with less money!

Go to http://www.myhosting.com and customize your own VPS server today

More about Custom VPS Server

Custom VPS is perfect solution to support your web development requirements. You also don't have to spend too much in renting a dedicated server for additional resources. If you would like to learn more about this service, please take a look at the below FAQs

What's custom VPS?

Custom VPS server means you can configure the VPS server for every features including disk space, RAM and CPU cores etc. Generally you need to be familiar with computing to compose a perfect custom VPS server.

Can I choose any kind server OS for custom vps hosting?

It depends, custom VPS hosting mainly allows people to customize the server hardware features. You can choose the OS offered by server provider.

Do I get hosting control panel?

You would be able to choose the needed hosting control panel during sign up.

Is custom vps server more expensive?

Since you need to configure the vps setup completely by yourself, the final server cost might be more or less than pre-setup vps hosting plan.

What's the main difference comparing to traditional VPS hosting?

There's no technicial difference for the two types server. The main difference is on the setup process. While you get everything pre-defined for traditional vps, you need to specify configuration by yourself.

Can I purchase additional resource after server setup?

Yes you can, you just need to pay the extra addon fees.

Top Free asp.net Hosting Reviewed

free asp.net hosting

There's always something free in the world. Since we can get it for free, why should we pay and waste our money? Long time ago we introduced a list of free web hosting providers which helped lots of webmasters with limited budget. However that list is not so accurate as the time when posting. Today I will post an updated list of free asp.net hosting with detailed comparison.

Generally speaking we have to bare with forced advertisement for free web hosting. If you search on google for free hosting providers there's a long list, however if you check further on their websites you will find most are Ads based with limited offers. Especially for the relatively expensive windows platform, it's pretty hard to find a really ads free hosting. After a bit research and testing, we get several popular free asp.net hosting brands. However, while they have high ranking in search results or any kind recommendation, there's big difference among them. To get things clear, I designed a basic table comparison as below.

Brands FreeAspwebhosting Somee WebhostforAsp Aspspider
Space 2048MB 150MB 100MB 100MB
Bandwidth 20GB/mo 5GB/mo 2GB/mo 2GB/mo
Domain Support 1 1 1 1
Control Panel Plesk 10 Doka Custom panel Custom panel
Server OS Server 2008 Server 2003/2008 Server 2008 Server 2003
Asp.net Version .Net 1.0 – 4.0 .Net 1.1 – 4.0 .Net 1.0 – 3.5 .Net 3.5/4.0
Ms Sql Support SQL 2008 Web Edition SQL 2005 – 2012 Express No SQL 2005 – 2008 Express
Service Status Open Open Closed Open
Forced Ads no yes yes no
Free Policy lifetime 5 visits in 30 days 6 months login 90 days

In the list, the Webhostforasp free asp.net hosting page states the service is temporarily closed for control panel change. However, after communication with their support they approved the free hosting plan will no longer available. I add them to the list because many people being redirected there for free asp.net hosting recommendation. We should refresh your memory.

Basically, the FreeAspwebhosting is the only one worthy of registration if you're going to use the service for long time purpose. Unless you would like to host multiple domain names with lots of traffic usage, their offers are pretty good.

Is Free Asp.net hosting suggested?

The answer is no. No matter what kind of features availabe there, we won't get quality 24 x 7 support which is available from paid hosting. Disaster recovery is another essential point. Almost no free hosting provider will offer daily or weekly backup in their system because we don't pay. Since there're so many disadvantages with free hosting, why people still looking for such service? Either because of limited budget or project testing purpose. A really quality site will never consider to host on free server.

Free Asp.net Hosting FAQs

Do I get top level domain name support with free asp.net hosting?

It depends, however you will need to pay for domain registration with the hosting provider for most of the cases.

Do I get free sql server database opportunity?

Generally speaking yes, however you will just get few MBs disk space and sql server is on old versions such as 2000 or 2005 or latest sql server express edition.

Do I get file manager opportunity?

Yes, you normally get a customized hosting control panel to manage all common hosting services.

Do I get email support?

No you will not get email support with free asp.net hosting service. You have to take advantages of third party SMTP.

Can I request to install third party components?

No, free asp.net hosting does not support any third party components installation.

Do I get daily backup service?

No, free asp.net hosting does not come with daily backup service. You have to backup everything by yourself.

Best Cheap Asp.net Hosting

Unlike linux hosting, asp.net hosting is not offered by many providers because it's costly to setup and people don't like the relatively expensive service. For quality asp.net hosting provider, we highly recommend Arvixe and Hostgator asp.net hosting plans. They are both configured with standard softwares/offers with very affordable price.

If you're just worried about the pay without trying out. Smarterasp.net is good choice where provides up to 60 days free trial period. No credit card required but just a simple registration! The people behind smarterasp is from old webhost4life team who is professional in windows hosting. After only 3 years working on new business, they got burst growth with complete new management systems.

Best IRC Hosting Reviews

IRC hosting

What's IRC?

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a protocol for real-time internet text messaging (chat) or synchronous conferencing. IRC was firstly created in 1988 by Jarkko Oikarinen. People communicate through IRC channels using their nicknames. An IRC server can connect to other IRC servers to expand the IRC network. Users access IRC networks by connecting a client to a server. From the wikipedia 2011 report, there're roughly 3200 IRC servers worldwide.

Why IRC?

High Efficiency – IRC is real-time text messaging, it's almost zero delay. It's essential feature for group meetings, especially for remote group meetings. There's no limitation about how many people can join. The most important is it's completely free!

Ease of use – We don't have to be professional to get IRC working. We can either install a separate IRC client software or web browser plugin directly to start the chat. The usage is not limited in case you're travelling outside.

Anonymity and masking – We don't have to be registered anywhere to use the service. Our privacy is completely protected and our IP address is hided too. Plus the anonymity, The data we sent is always encrypted by SSL. Means no matter if we are chatting publicly or in private message, the channel is secured.

Why IRC is restricted by many hosting providers?

Since there're so many advantages of IRC, why many hosting companies restrict or even prohibit this service? To understand such policy we must know clearly what we would like to do.

If you're just looking for an IRC channel, start a channel on an established network (for example the EFnet, IRCnet etc). You'll have stable services with no worry about any of the technical stuff. For such case, most hosting service should do the work because the hosting server is not involved into the service.

On the other hand, if you're going to purchase an IRCd to host your own server, which would also give you IRCop access and mostly power benefits then you must evaluate carefully. The actual prohibition is talking about this method. In case we setup the IRC service on server in wrong way,  it's easy to kill the server and introduce into DDOS attack to the entire network. That's why many hosting prohibit it restrictly.

In our opinions, it's not necessary to create our own station because it will take us lots of time to maintain the system with professional skills. Instead, we can take the advantage of existing networks and create our own channel directly.

Who provides IRC hosting service?

We do not have direct experience with IRC hosting service. However, from various reviews on the web, the Sh3lls.net provides high quality and cheap IRCd shell hosting for only 5$ per month. If you want to host your own irc server, or start your own IRC network, their service is worthy of checking out. They have several plans with different user limits. If you think it's just too less to deal with, you might need a quality VPS or dedicated server to setup your IRC network.

Top Budget Dedicated Server Hosting

budget dedicated server hosting

Why should we use a dedicated server? Because we get 100% server root access, less restriction and fully customizable to meet our IT requirements. The RAM, storage space and bandwidth available to you as a shared or virtual server hosting will never meet the needs of a large scale website. If your website is generating a great mount of traffic, a dedicated server hosting plan will be best choice! In case you have limited budget but have to go with a dedicated server, Let's check the top budget dedicated server hosting plans and choose it through your live requirements.

TOP Budget Dedicated Server Hosting Service

The server hardwares are more and more cheap and there's some part decrease from service pricing, however most quality server plans are still expensive. Below is a list of the most popular budget dedicated server providers

Brands DirectSpace BurstNET Hostgator VolumeDrive Bluehost
Pricing $79/mo $69/mo $74/mo $34.95/mo $74.99/mo
Hard Disk 2×160 GB 250 GB 2×250 GB 250 GB 1 TB
Bandwidth 20TB/mo 5TB/mo 10TB 8TB 10TB
RAM 2GB 2GB 2GB 2GB 2GB
CPU Specs Intel Pentium D 820 2 x 2.8GHz Xeon 3050 / E6500 DUAL CORE 2.13GHZ Intel Xeon 3450(Quad Core) AMD Athlon X2 4200+ (2 cores) 4*2.5 GHz
Port Speed 1gbps 100mbps 100mbps 100mbps 100mbps
Official Site directspace.net burst.net Hostgator.com volumedrive.com Bluehost.com

Note: The hostgator $74/mo server is only applied to windows dedicated server plans, the original price is $174/mo and they're currently running promotion which is $100 off.

From above list, only bluehost is cloud based service, you get instant provisioning upon order/payment verification. If you're old bluehost client, you get free upgrade to 4*2.5GHz plus 1 TB storage! Bluehost cloud servers are quite flexible to meet any your website requirement. From cloud center you get simple and direct view of system usage, users be able to manage all services professionally. The system is 100% mobile compatible, means you can access to it anywhere with internet access!

bluehost dedicated plans

More about Budget Dedicated Server Hosting

The server providers in the list are well known to many web masters and web design companies. Their service be able to support most web application requirements with the least limitation. Also, further upgrade is available to all server plans so it's almost risk free to deal with.

However, please keep in mind, most of their server plans are unmanaged because of the price. If you need further support such as hosting control panel you need to pay extra for the service. The differences between managed and unmanaged servers are negligible in terms of hardware, but depending on your needs, picking one over the other may be disastrous. With the unmanaged server, you just get the server hardware and server system, you have to deal with all setup and configurations and hosting firm will assist less unless problem is occured on their end.

How Do We Think About?

When we consider something "budget" we should always remember the golden rule "you get what you pay". Indeed, because it will cost money to prepare all stuff, we really should have some basic knowledge of the market and understand how much we need to pay for a quality server we need. They hosting provider will never do something non-profitable. It's normal to see a super cheap server plan with outdated haredware setup. In case we're dealing with some doubtable service, it's recommended to use a third party software to test out the server performance.

Another point would be the server connection capacity. Just imagine about a home server, how much work can it do? So the datacenter specs are pretty essential beside pricing. Generally, it's recommended to search our server provider from the well known datacenter companies such as Softlayer, Dallas etc. If you have never heard of the name, there's always some testing tools available to check about their connectivities.

Budget Dedicated Server Hosting FAQs

Unless you're not sure if you're in need of such service, you can read the following questions and answers then make the smart decision.

What's budget dedicated server hosting?

Budget dedicated server or cheap server hosting means you pay less than regular for server hosting service. It's a type of hosting service with less cost.

What does a budget dedicated server provider do?

The server provider will mainly do maintenance on network and hardware protection. You have to maintain the server system and backup etc completely by yourself.

What you will get from a budget dedicated server hosting service?

You will basically get the server hardware and server system. You will get basic tech support by server firms like OS installation and network configuration etc. You will need to configure all other service by your own.

What you should pay attention to in selecting a good server provider?

There're several check points to look at such as: ① Company reputation ② Server hardware/network specs ③ Existing user feedbacks/reviews ④ check with pre-sales directly with all your questions. Because you will pay money to server provider, don't hesitate to contact their people to clear out all your doubts, they will be happy to answer all your questions.


Best Hyper-v Hosting Revealed

hyper-v hosting

The requests of VPS server has been increasing because more and more business are going online with fast growing up. Choosing a quality vps server provider is the primary work for webmaster. Here I would like to introduce one of the best Virtual server product – Hyper-V and the best hosting provider.

Hyper-V Introduction

Hyper-V is a virtual server product from Microsoft. It is an integral part of windows server and provides a foundational virtualization platform that enables you to transition to the cloud. It's also the Microsoft first attempt to use hypervisor based technology like Vmware and Xen. Means Hyper-V will compete with the leading products directly but might be in different ways. The newest release of Hyper-V server 2008 R2 is a stand-alone product which allows you to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server. It's the best if you're running a cloud computing service.

Hyper-V VPS Hosting Advantages

Because Hyper-V is the newest name in virtual server products, it brought us a great list of advantages. Especially for those who have been used to Microsoft windows platform, Hyper-V is probably the best solution. Here's a list of several outstanding features

  1. Windows Server 2008 – Hyper-V is Based on the microsoft best server OS – Windows Server 2008 R2. The hyper visor sits between the physical hardware and the host operating system and enables the physical hardware to be virtualized and therefore we can run multiple different operating systems.
  2. Resource allocations – The technique makes it possible for physical hardware to be used very efficiently. The resources (CPU, memory and disk) can easily be added to different virtual machines on the fly!
  3. Across Platform compatibility – Except for multiple different OS support, we can easily migrate the VPS instance from other solutions like Vmware. It's completely risk free process
  4. Safe and Reliable – Hyper-V uses an architecture with a bus structure. Because the virtualization is built into Windows Server 2008 which has strong safety policies. Plus, we can define the security level from VPS creation.
  5. Basically, the Hyper-V is a safe and efficient server virtualization system that offers the best solution within a hosting environment.

Best Hyper-V VPS server hosting

There would be lots of hosting companies with hyper-v support. However, unless you can afford the service from those world class server providers, I highly recommend the arvixe and myhosting hyper-v hosting.

The arvixe hyper-v vps server comes with 30GB disk space and 1536 MB RAM for start. We only need to pay $30/mo with everything pre-configured for example the popular websitepanel, sql server 2008 express and php/mysql etc. The hyper-v server with arvixe is 100% managed with all necessary tools

arvixe hyper-v hosting

Myhosting advantage would be their price. With around $25/mo we get almost the same features from arvixe. The difference is there's no bandwidth limits from arvixe while it's 300 ~ 600 GB on myhosting server. If you have a heavy traffic site you might purchase extra bandwidth or upgrade to higher plan. Make sure to evaluate carefully about your website requirements.

Hyper-V vs Vmware

Both Hyper-V and Vmware are leading virtualization products. The Vmware has long history in server virtualization field and has been leading the industry with their various products such as Workstation, VSphere etc. Generally speaking, the Vmware products can meet the requirements for both personal and enterprise groups. Back to Hyper-V, we need relatively high standards server to make everything working perfect. It's mainly designed for enterprise solution. If you would like to learn more about their difference and advantages you can check this page for a detailed comparison: Microsoft hyper-v R2 vs vmware vsphere