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Affordable Web Hosting Review

Affordable Web hosting is a term with price concern when people searching for a web hosting service. Affordable hosting means the hosting plan is acceptable by user's budget while the hosting features are good enough to meet the user requirements. The word affordable can be vary by different user requirements, but mostly it means relatively cheap service.

In order to select the correct affordable hosting plan, you have to do lots of research among hundreds of companies. Based our 10+ years editorial experience, We have compiled a list of top affordable hosting providers based price, hosting features and live user experience.

Top Affordable Hosting – iPage

Brand: iPage Price: $1.99/mo Rates: A+

iPage is awarded the most affordable hosting provider for low priced hosting plan and lots of leading offers.

The ipage hosting original price is at $7.95/mo for regular sign up. They're just running promotion at the moment and offers super discount for only $1.99/mo! With this price you get FREE domain registration, Free control panel, Unlimited domain hosting & Mysql database plus over $400 bonus over web design and search engine credits! You can't find better offer from any other hosting service.

Go to www.iPage.com for affordable hosting plan!

Top Affordable Hosting – WebhostingHub

Brand: WebhostingHub Price: $4.99/mo Rates: A+

WebhostingHub is awarded the fastest affordable hosting provider with cpanel support. Besides all other leading features from the top hosting providers, webhostinghub highlights their service with fast server connection and extra security protection.

Webhostinghub is sister brand of Inmotion hosting which is recognized the best business hosting provider. With webhostinghub, you get most service unlimited for up to 90 days money back guarantee! This simply shows their confidence to keep your business with them. Webhostinghub outstanding offers includes:

• Free domain registration
• Unlimited domain name hosting
• Unlimited database
• Free website transfer from other hosts

Go to www.WebhostingHub.com and view more advantages!

Top Affordable Hosting – Justhost

Brand: Justhost Price: $2.25/mo Rates: A

Justhost is rated the best affordable hosting provider from editor's choice. You get standard cpanel hosting service for $2.95/mo. Everything with justhost is offered as unlimited including hosted domains, mysql databases and server space etc. You also get a free domain name plus any time money back guarantee.

Justhost Affordable hosting plan core features includes:

• 99% uptime guarantee and qualify 24 x7 tech support
• unlimited disk space and hosting bandwidth
• Cpanel with installer over 100+ scripts
• Free domain for life and unlimited domain hosting
• Discount price as high as 50% OFF!

Go to Justhost.com for affordable hosting plans

How to Rate The Top Affordable Web Hosting?

Since the hosting business is more and more competitive, There're many web hosting companies that offer hosting plans under $5/mon but not all be able to offer the quality service. To find the right affordable hosting is quite important to reduce any potential issues and make more success for your business. If you're searching for the best affordable hosting, our 6 years hosting experience with 100+ hosting companies tells us above hosting service will work the best.

Since it's price concerned, free hosting is abviously the best choice for an affordable hosting but it's never recommended for a business website since it will require much more features which is not included in free hosting plan and even you found such free plan, eventually you will have to upgrade to a paid service with all kinds of inconvenience.

The best affordable hosting should be under $5/mon hosting fee with all required features for running an e-commerce site. Below is a list of necessary features for a best affordable hosting:

• Multiple free email addresses
• 24/7 tech support
• Daily Backups
• At least 2GB of disk space and 10 GB of bandwidth
• User-friendly database and hosting control panel
• A content management system such as Drupal or Joomla
• At least a 95% up-time guarantee.
• A free shopping cart for Ecommerce

More about Affordable Hosting Service

Affordable hosting plan cost you less of website investment and you get all necessary service to get your website online. The web hosting industry is actually more and more competitive nowadyas. Some cheap hosting service is even beyond your imagination. However, it doesn't mean everyone is doing good on the low cost service. Many hosting providers grab your business by offering super cheap service and force you to pay for various problems.

A decent service gives you the ability to set up e-mail accounts, blog installation and lots of whistles to improve the usability of your site. While they offer reliable service, they continue to give people as much as possible within their abilities.

Lighttpd Brief Introduction

Lighttpd (pronounced "lighty") is an open-source web server and designed to power the delivery of web content to small and large sites alike. With enhanced support for implementing scalabe FastCGI web applications, this web server has enjoyed increasing popularity with organizations focused on delivering dynamic content with less overhead than traditionally deployed solutions like Apache.

Security, speed, compliance, and flexibility — all of these describe lighttpd which is rapidly redefining efficiency of a webserver. Lighthttpd is perfect solution for every server that is suffering load problems.

Since lighthttpd is the perfect alternative option for Apache and compatible with all apache configurations. Many popular websites are powered by lighthttpd for heavy traffic solutions. Websites such as youtube, wikipedia are lighthttpd powered.

Best Lighttpd Web Hosting

Since lighthttpd is rarely deployed to hosting environment, mostly you have to configure it by yourself on vps or dedicated server. For lighthttpd hosting, what you're really looking for is a reliable vps or dedicated server provider. For vps solutions we highly recommend hostgator and greengeeks. they both offer affordable and reliable vps solutions.

However, instead dealing with something you're not familiar with, we don't recommend having lighttped installed on your production server unless you're very professional in managing all the services. There's not yet a popular control panel support over this web server. Most tasks have to be managed through ssh communication.

On the other hand, there're lots of lightweight web server solutions like litespeed, nginx etc which is working perfect on many servers. Most  of them can be added to cpanel control panel directly via installer or few ssh commands.

Lighttpd vs Apache vs Nginx

From this nginx hosting page, we have discussed that nginx is the best choice for single heavy traffic websites on a vps or dedicated server. Apache is widely used for almost 99% web hosting providers for it's stableness, but how about lighthttpd? To understand more, we have make few tests on our own server, here're few points.

Test with the default configurations, all the three web servers have no real difference under 500 concurrent connections and performed perfectly.

When concurrent connections reach to about 1000, lighthttpd catched about 99% errors while nginx is 100%!

Apache is stable solution for web hosting solutions, optimized nginx and lighttpd is good for vps and dedicated server.

If you're going to offer web hosting service to people, we highly suggest the popular choice other than giving yourself challenges. If you need fast and stable web server solutions, apache is reliable choice after many years' production installation. If you need faster speed, you can also consider litespeed which is recognized 10 times faster than apache and fully compatible with apache configuration rules!

Free Web Hosting Review

Free hosting service means zero cost to have website hosted. Normally the service is setup with some kinds of advertisement on client websites. Free hosting service is only good choice for beginner and should be only for testing or hobby site purpose since there're lots of restrictions or limitations. In this article we'll review free hosting side by side and list out some top free hosting providers.

Why There's Free Hosting Service?

it's mainly because of there're many requests for free services on the market. For users who just want to test out something or put up non-profitable website, free hosting is their first choice.

Generally speaking, a free hosting provider always comes with paid plans and will suggest you go with the paid service, the free hosting plan is mostly used for advertising purpose. This method is quite popular under reseller hosting. When they start a hosting business they always use free hosting to get customers and later force change to paid plan. Under such circumstance, when you search for a free hosting provider, you should read some reviews first and check the service quality side by side.

How Does Free Hosting Provider Profit?

Many people have asked simliar questions, so how does exactly the free hosting provider profit?

The answer is advertisement and paid service. Normally you got inserted some kind of advertisement on your website by the free hosting, as long as your website get more traffic, the more possibility the advertisement will be clicked; another point is the paid service, free hosting providers always have some kind of paid hosting plan and encourage people to upgrade to. If some day you find the free service not suitable anymore you will prabably use their paid hosting.

Best Free Hosting Providers

When you search from google you would found there're many free hosting providers with all kinds of features. Here we evaluated several top rated free providers based on hosting features and customer satisfaction. A good free hosting provider should come with the following features enabled:

1. Ease of use with support for popular scripting such as asp, php
2. Basic support for common databases such as mysql, ms access
3. Hosting control panel available
4. Upgrade option available for higher solutions

Top free PHP Mysql hosting

• www.000webhost.com
• www.byethost.com
• www.x10hosting.com
• www.host1free.com
• www.110mb.com

Top free asp.net hosting

• www.webhostforasp.net
• www.brinkster.com
• www.somee.com
• www.aspspider.com
• www.asphost4free.com

Do We Recommend Free Hosting Service?

Absolutely No. Unless you don't mind to keep the business in high risk, you should never put your business site on free hosting space. You have to bear with lots of ads on your pages plus lots of spam emails about various promotions to upgrade to paid service. As for web hosting business today, it's already very affordable from many providers like ipage, webhostinghub etc. With about $2/mo you have full access to hosting service with quality customer support. To save your efforts and time in using hosting service, we highly suggest paid service instead free ones.

AspDotNetStorefront Introduction

Storefront or AspDotNetStorefront has the longest history for asp.net e-commerce solution. The name Aspdotnetstorefront has been a leading brand since 1997. Storefront has been offerring all kinds of successful e-commerce solutions to personal, midium to large size business communities at a very aggresive pricing, storefront now used by over 5000 developers and 10000 global customers.

The software is extremely optimized for large visits and search engine friendly. The code design or general software structure is by skillful programmers based thousands of true user experience. The software provides easy customization of site layouts and settings to drive the most in revenue growth and conversion rates.

Best Storefront Hosting Provider

AspDotNetStorefront actually offers hosting service by themselves on their website which starts at $39.95/mo for shared hosting service. It's absolutely not acceptable for most people. Since the software system requirements are pretty standard like many other applications, lots of asp.net hosting plans be able to host it. The best aspdotnetstorefront hosting provider with our experience goes to Arvixe & Hostgator.

Both Arvixe & Hostgator windows hosting plans are fully storefront compatible with lots of leading offers like unlimited ms sql database and free domain registration as well as remote iis manager support etc. You can manage asp.net applications easily via their leading hosting control panels. Just get the software from aspdotnetstorefront site and have it hosted with the leading platforms!

Go to www.Arvixe.com for storefront hosting plans!
Visit www.hostgator.com for plan details

Why they're the best aspdotnetstorefront hosting service?

We supported lots of storefront users before. From our server end monitory, the storefront applications will easily crash IIS application pools under a shared hosting. Once such problem occurs, we'll have to restart IIS or assign the app to a dedicated app pools. Hosting aspdotnetstorefront site via dedicated pool is the best choice. We highly recommend above web hosts for storefront hosting simply because they're fully .net compatible service with leading platforms that comes with dedicated application pool support. Besides all popular offers from other hosting provider, you get remote iis manager to manage your site directly. You won't find better solution from other place.

AspDotNetStorefront Advantages

Since storefront has the longest history and experience in asp.net e-commerce solution, definitely security is the most outstanding feature comparing to other e-commerce packages. Since it's a paid product, you will get side by side technical support from storefront company. Storefront main features come with the following:

• Ability to design store skins (interface) in Dreamweaver or FrontPage
• Excel or Xml product import
• Support for most popular gateways such as Authorize.net, linkpoint and paypal
• Complete support for robust Search Engine crawling
• support for an HTML pages (we call these topic pages)
• Supports categories and departments, which can be nested up to 10 levels deep

• Auto E-Mailing of receipts, Receipt Customization

• Multiple ship-to /bill-to addresses (with address book)

• Many payment methods: Credit Card, PayPal, E-Check, C.O.D., Request Quote, PayPal Express, Micropay/Purse, Check by Mail, C.O.D. Net 30, and others.

• RealTime FedEx, UPS, DHL, USPS, and Canada Post Shipping Rates already integrated.

Requirements to use Storefront

• asp.net framework 3.5
• Windows NT Server 2003 or 2008, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Home Premium, or Windows 7
• IIS 6 or IIS 7
• Databases Supported:
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Express (for small sites)
• Internet Merchant Account
• SSL
• Optional: Visual Studio.net or other asp.net development tool if you want to change source code

Storefront Resources

• AspDotNetStorefront Official site
• AspDotNetStorefront Wiki
• AspDotNetStorefront Support Forums
• AspDotNetStorefront Templates

Storefront vs Nopcommerce vs Dashcommerce

Storefront, nopcommerce and dashcommerce are all based on asp.net technologies but not all are suitable for your e-commerce solution since there're many difference.

First, storefront is not free product, you have to buy from aspdotnetstorefront.com site and they will provide you license, there does have a free trial version but it's indeed just for trial which can't be used for live production. Storefront is highly recommend if you highly wish tech support and don't have a developer available. As for nopcommerce, it's popularized in recent years for open source, definnitely is a perfect solution for free e-commerce software. It's powered by lots of support professionals everywhere in the world. As for dashcommerce, I think only few people will continue with it these days for its dead development.

Dashcommerce Introduction

DashCommerce is an asp.net Open Source e-Commerce Application. Built using some of the latest technologies, dashCommerce is focused on providing a robust e-commercce application that is stable and highly usable. In addition, the dashCommerce community is one of the most active communities in the open source / .NET space. DashCommerce has been available since early 2008 and has been used in countless online stores and is wildly successful.

Dashcommerce Hosting Requirements

• Windows XP Pro or Higher
• Internet Information Service (IIS)
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (Minimum)
• ASP.NET AJAX Extensions 3.0

Dashcommerce core features

• Order Notification System (email)
• Configurable Tax Rates and Shipping rates
• Drop-In Themes / Skinning
• Drop-In Configurable Shipping providers
• Configurable Content Management System (unlimited pages)
• Compatible with multiple Payment gateways

Best Dashcommerce Hosting provider

Arvixe.com is awarded the best dashcommerce hosting for both tech compatibility and server uptime. Arvixe is also one of the best Asp.net hosting provider with fully support over lots of popular asp.net projects like Nopcommerce, Dotnetnuke, Asp.net staterkits etc. With Arvixe Asp.net hosting plan you get unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited Sql Server database. Their hosting is backend by a professional team that has years experience in Asp.net development.

Read Arvixe reviews
Visit www.arvixe.com

Dashcommerce related articles and resources

• Dashcommerce Official site
• Dashcommerce Forum
• Dashcommerce Blog
• Dashcommerce free skin
• Dashcommerce Hosting

Dashcommerce vs Nopcommerce

Both Dashcommerce and Nopcommerce are top rated .net e-commerce packages and there's always comparison between them, so which package is better?

• Code project – Open source feature is for both projects, but definitely nopcommerce update more frequently while dashcommerce almost stopped updating these days
• Structures – If you have compared the package structure on your website, you will found dashcommerce is much easier and clean, dashcommerce is ideal choice for start user and nopcommerce is definitely better for a large and professional ecommerce solution
• Support – Although both official sites setup a discussion forum but definitely nopcommerce doing better and much more famous to people. Since dashcommerce almost stopped the update, there's less and less support available.

Dashcommerce team almost stopped the software further development and support. If you check their official site you should have found there's no newer version update since from the first release. On the other hand, nopcommerce is supported by a huge community and updated frequently for bug fix and new features development. Powered by lots of modules/templates, you can create any kind store site using this platform. From web hosting side, many providers even highlight their service by supporting nopcommerce.

Conclusion, if you're going to setup a large e-commerce store and wish to get fast and professional support, nopcommerce is your better choice. Read Nopcommerce review.