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.

BetterServers Review

betterservers review

BetterServers is one of the most popular projects leaded by Matt Heaton – the founder of bluehost and hostmonster. From its official announcement, betterservers is the next generation of technology to come from hosting industry experts with the mission to improve your IT experience. Since 2009, the company setup their own data center structures and powering lots of famous hosting brands with their modern equipments and technologies.

The history of betterservers

Betterservers project was born from bluehost company when Heaton is still CEO there. After years fast business growth, he found some weakness of their server and dc facilities. For example when there's heavy loading then their servers can not handle the traffic properly for guaranteed performance. Thus their team applied "CPU throtting" which is criticized by lots of people. The faster their business grows, the more problems being produced. In order to solve such problems, their management team two popular projects – Betterlinux & Betterservers. At the meanwhile, new data center construction is being prepared.

Products of Betterservers

Betterservers group is aimed at providing the best performance hosting servers. Their products/plans focus on the latest server and network technologies – Cloud. They provide cloud/hybrid servers as well as virtual data center service.

  • Cloud Servers. Fully customizable. CPU cores can be vary from 1 to 32 per instance, DDR3 RAM can be up to 128 GB. You have opportunity to use individual or blocks of IPv4/6 addresses. The biggest difference comparing to all existing server plans is its high speed haredware I/O and network. From live testing, its storage I/O speed is up to 4GB/s.
  • Virtual Data Center. You have opportunity to build your own virtual data centers other than limited by private cloud environment. You will get 8 networks per virtual datacenter with free security setup. VPN is included free so user access to your facilities can be well controlled. The smart dynamic balance design be able to handle any size load and ensures you have enough resource to work with and don't pay extra. There're sophisticated caching and mirroring technology and 10Gbps port speed which is dedicated to your network, means your server will not be slowed down.

Dedicated server and storage service are also being prepared as explained on their website. Generally speaking, their people use the best hardware configuration in their modern data centers to deliver the best performance.

Betterservers and Betterlinux

Relationship between the two names are exactly the same as bluehost and hostmonster. But they're offering different service. Betterservers provides server service directly to hosting groups and individuals while betterlinux is a server optmizer. From their official explanation, all betterservers platforms are optimized using betterlinux. The optimizer is provided as commercial service for $9.9/mon. Once configured, it will optimize your server based its hardware configuration. It's not just one time setup, it will work and monitor your system lively and apply necessary changes if needed. The mission of betterlinux is to ensure you get a secure and high performance server environment.

Their Clients

Till present, the betterservers service is used by multiple leading hosting brands of endurance group including bluehost, hostgator and justhost. It's also used by lots of IT companies who have high requirements to server performance and security.

Because you have opportunity to setup your own virtual data center, you get dedicated resources, security and scalability. The system simply works the same as a physical data center but you don't have to handle the setup & configuration. Everything is prepared by their tech teams, then you get full access to all service. What makes it outstanding is you get a web portal access to all products. You can start/suspend a server directly without logging into the actual server instance. All servers statistics such as CPU/RAM usage and traffic status are lively produced and well organized.

Web portal demo: https://www.betterservers.com/control-center/dashboard

By checking the industry you will find there's not another IT group provides similar service as betterservers. It's mostly like they will be another industry standard in near future. Their successful experience from bluehost and hostmonster will help promote this new service to more and more people. Their products are currently powering some famous hosting services so it's just a matter of time for other companies to follow up.

Check out this video about their CEO introduction for betterservers

Is Justhost Good WordPress Hosting Provider?

is justhost good wordpress hosting provider?

Justhost is one of the most popular budget hosting choice with unlimited feature support. With regarding to wordpress this simple but powerful website script, how does justhost work like? Because most bloggers don't want to invest a lot for simple blog site, thus a cheap service provider like justhost is always hot choice. This article provides a detailed guidance for justhost wordpress support and something you should aware.

Firstly, let's check out the justhost current promo. With no need any coupon code, justhost provides $2.95/mo promotional price which was only available after 50% discount before. It's absolutely good news for everyone who liked their service.

View justhost promotional plan features at http://www.justhost.com

Wordpress Hosting Features

Justhost server is absolutely 100% wordpress compatible. All available features are actually more than enough to support wordpress software. Their unlimited disk storage and mysql databases let you setup multiple websites without paying extra. WordPress is just a part of their hosting spotlights because their service is not just optimized for wordpress but also compatible with lots of other website scripts. Their people even provide a sitebuilder wizard to help with quick website creation in case you don't have one and don't want to deal with technical issues.

Because justhost support a large number wordpress sites on hosting servers. Their tech team provide a resourceful support knowledge base for it. This includes setup FAQs, Video tutorials and step by step guidance in using this software. Recently, their people have applied all available support resources from bluehost/hostgator site since they're now sister brands.

Wordpress Website Performance

With our personal testing on simple wordpress site, the justhost server performance is pretty fast. We loaded a basic wordpress site within 2 seconds during day time. We also tried to add multiple pictures on single page and the waiting time is around 5 seconds. Normally, the server hardware configuration determines website speed directly. Justhost professionals use standard linux server and management control panel software. System OS is CentOS 6.4 with betterlinux optimization. Every server comes with minimum 24GB RAM and Dual core Intel® Xeon processor.

Especially after migrated to bluehost data center, there's more than enough server bandwidth to support existing clients. The modern data center is created to meet up with the next 30 years IT requirements as said from its founder.

Ease of use

Justhost provides standard cpanel hosting service with all add-on service. From control panel center people can install the latest version wordpress by few clicks. Once all files are loaded to your account you can use the platform right away. CPanel is the industry leading control panel software that's used by most users. No matter if you have used this software or not before, you will find its user friendly and profession in handling website service.

Upgrade Availability

Started in middle of this year, justhost provides VPS and dedicated server opportunity to all people. The initial month service is provided with 50% discount. Unlike traditional server plans, the justhost vps and dedicated servers are cloud based with instant provision. Means your server is ready once payment is confirmed. Such advantage is not available from another server company.

Customer Experience

Well, like all other big hosting providers that come with both positive and negative reviews. Justhost received tons of great and bad feedbacks. Their management team did not filter such comments but just provided there directly from testimonial area. Personally, we don't have met any serious problem with justhost service because we just host a simple test site on their server. But that definitely doesn't mean everything is perfect with their service. To use justhost or not will depend your exact requirement. Before you register, you might ask yourself the following questions:

  • How much web storage/traffic do you need?
  • What kind of website you're going to promote?
  • What level support do you need for the website?
  • What kind of uptime you can accept?
  • How much you like to invest for the product?

Basically, the justhost web hosting service is budget choice that's best for small to medium size wordpress site. If you just focus on their low cost plan then most probably it will result in failure. If you could carefully answer above questions then you will be guided in right direction. WordPress is a simple support for most hosting service but since it allows you to promote any kind website, not every hosting service be able to support it properly. You might find it perfect with justhost for simple personal blog, but if you use it for business purpose with big traffic, you probably need a business hosting provider or simply check out their vps server.

justhost $2.95 special promo

Inmotion Hosting Support Reviewed

inmotion hosting support reviewed

Inmotion is one of the most reputable hosting providers that are highly recommended by IT professionals. The company provides great hosting plans to support your various business requirements. Recent years, the company revised their official site and plan structures a lot to be more user friendly and meet up with your hosting needs. In this article we'll provide an in depth review of inmotion hosting support based our continuous testing experience.

When we purchase a hosting service, support is the mostly concerned besides price. Especially for business hosting service, support quality is always primary consideration because a single failure may bring huge loss. When people can't place orders on your site, a professional customer support will do needful help to put your business back. Inmotion is such group who is always standing behind your business with 24*7 live monitoring.

A solid Team

Inmotion hosting is powered by a solid team who has been worked several years in the group. If you check their company blog and staff area you will find there's almost no change with their names. Why is this important? Because a solid team and loyal staff members will simply drive the company business in highway. They don't have to handle new staff training over and over again by cutting their support resources. Based their multiple working experience from the company, their staff be able to fix most problems in quick and professional actions so customers don't have to wait hours or days.

inmotion hosting support team

They're pretty active in posting recent company affairs to blog and forum threads to show their efforts in offering better hosting service. Their working environments, office, indoor and outdoor affairs are all snapshoted to photo gallery. Why is this important? because clients will understand they're working in good environments instead their bedroom. It's also helpful for clients to understand how they're supporting you and what kind of efforts they're doing by real view. This is, however not available from most other hosting providers.

Real Human 24*7 professional support

Inmotion hosting group guarantees 24*7 live support for all support channels by real staffs. We know it's horrible to work at middle night but their people managed doing so with full passion. They understand how important their work is because they're trusted by thousands of customers. We tried to call in at 11:00PM for account renewal inquiry. Normally their billing staffs should have gone back home or sleeping because there's no reason to keep such support at night. But their people surprised me again. When I clicked live chat to select the proper support channel, all support is online!

inmotion hosting support status

What really surprised me is their fast action in handling my inquiries. After verified the account ownership, they fixed my inquiry in just few seconds. I can't imagine because I always need to submit tickets then wait hours from other hosting service. Especially at this period, there's no billing support for all my other hosting accounts.

Resourceful help base

Inmotion hosting staff members created very resourceful help materials in FAQ, Video tutorials and Education center. All support documentations are well categorized with easy navigation. People can easily search out the available topics from search bar. What makes their support different is their educational center. It's FAQ/knowledge base for most popular website softwares/tools like drupal, mambo, joomla and wordpress etc. It's a side by side guidance in using/customize those open source CMS. If it's your first time in using one of which, it's great place to check out because it will guide you how to make a professional and security site.

inmotion hosting support feature

Based all above advantages, inmotion hosting stands on top of the best web hosting support list. But being the leading business hosting provider, inmotion not just provides the top notch support, their hosting plan features are also leading comparing to most server providers. Especially their unbeatable hosting server speed, you can not get the same quality for same paying. Inmotion hosting is your primary choice if you need high performance server and helpful customer support around the clock.

Visit inmotion hosting official site for plans and promo http://www.inmotionhosting.com

Is Bluehost Good WordPress Hosting Provider?

is bluehost good wordpress hosting provider?

Bluehost, a reputable hosting provider in the industry which is also the primary recommendation by wordpress official site. It's hosting multi millions small to medium size websites. As about 1/3 websites are wordpress based from official reports. So is bluehost good wordpress hosting provider?

The answer is yes, from following reviews we will unveil how bluehost support wordpress side by side.

WordPress Compatible Hosting Server

Bluehost is wordpress project golden partner since from the very beginning. Because of this partnership, bluehost strictly setup their servers to meet up with the software requirements. Their tech team also test locally to ensure the server is optimized properly to deliver the best performance on clients website. Based their co-operation with wordpress, they can get the latest updates from the project team and do needful changes on server end.

In order to support wordpress perfectly, bluehost provides following advantages on every hosting server.

  • All necessary apache web server modules like Mod_rewrite and mod_security.
  • Multiple PHP versions are provided with up to 64MB PHP memory_limit to support your different wordpress requirements.
  • Hosting server is deeply optimized by betterlinux optimizer.

Leading Website Loading Speed

Unlike most other web hosts who rent data center space from ISP, bluehost created their own data centers to meet up with the next 30 years tech requirements. Their modern data centers are powered by multi network backbones and 24*7 live monitoring guards. Each server is setup with UPS power backup and failover backup. Means if a server goes down for any reason, a backup server will take over the work so your site is always up.

Bluehost is hosting lots of famous wordpress sites and their best loading record for simple wordPress site is less than 1 second. The best loading speed for heavy traffic site is less than 2 seconds which is absolutely leading comparing to most cheap hosting service. The most important point is they never stopped improving, their server hardwares and softwares are always updated with new production.

Super friendly support and High rate satisfication

Their support teams are all IT engineers who have multi years development experience and many of them are member or leading from various open source projects. Their people are involved to wordpress development directly and have developed a series of video tutorials to help users in using wordpress properly on their hosting server and quick solution for most common issues. In case you need to talk to support directly, their people are working around the clock and will pick up your calls in few seconds. They provide multiple support channels including website chat, phone calls and ticket. You can always select your desired communicating channel to proceed.

From multi hundreds customer feedback pages, most clients give 4 or 5 stars for their service and support and lots of unhappy clients finally added more comments for good solutions.

Simplescripts WordPress Installation

Bluehost uses simplescripts auto installer in cpanel center. Unlike most other providers with softaculous or fantastic support, simplescripts is a project leaded by bluehost group. Means they fully understand this software and knows how to improve the user experience properly. Users won't find a single problem in using simplescripts for wordpress installation. Just few clicks away and all necessary files will be loaded to your website directory and database will be setup properly. You will find how simple the process is.

Do we recommend?

Absolutely yes. Bluehost is one of the very few web hosting providers who can provide dedicated support for wordpress. Being the software official recommendation, bluehost not only guarantees 100% compatible hosting server but also provides leading after sale supports to ensure your web properties in safe place.

If we take a look about the bluehost hosting plans and features, we should have found it's not just suitable for wordpress but 100% compatible with lots of softwares like joomla and other open source projects. Their price $3.95/mo is absolutely leading among most cheap hosting plans. You might find a cheaper service but you can hardly find another service with the same level support and performance.

Find more details about bluehost from official site http://www.bluehost.com

Multiple Domains Support Hosting Pros & Cons

multiple domains support hosting pros and cons

Most web hosting providers support multiple domain names per hosting account. They also highly advertise this feature to win orders on the market. How to host multiple domains from a single account? What would be the benifit and disadvantage in doing so? We have carried out a list explanation & comparison of this support so you can check how to take this advantage by the best practice.

How to host multiple domains from single account?

The purpose of this feature is to help launch multiple different websites without opening multiple hosting accounts. There's no technical problem at all to support this feature for any hosting service. For linux servers, we need to create multiple "virtualhost" or multiple IIS entries for windows server. It's all about the hosting company policy to allow or not. In order to host multiple domain names for different website purpose, we need to add new domain names to point to different sub directories. For cpanel control panel, it's designed as "add new website". When adding a new site, the system will auto create a new folder using the same name of the domain. Then we can upload files to specific folders to put up new website.

Benefits of multiple domain names hosting

Hosting multiple websites under the same account bring us great convenience and simplified the process of website hosting. The outstanding advantages mainly include following

  • Easy website management. You can manage all websites under the same control panel. All website files/databases and email accounts can be all well organized centrally without log in/out from different accounts. Especially for web development groups who always need to test multiple sites at the same time. Multiple domain support is quite essential feature.
  • More secure. You just need a single user id/password for your hosting account. In this way you don't have to sign up multiple service and remember different ids and passwords. This greatly reduced potential security issues such as password leaking.
  • Less cost. You just need to pay a single account fee which is an obvious advantage comparing to multiple accounts price.

As we see above, multiple domain support is quite important feature and come with outstanding advantages. It's not only good for hosting providers to gain more business, clients will also make full use of the service for better experience.

The Weakness

Security is still the big concern. While it brings people the convenience for multiple sites support, you simply put all eggs into one basket. In case the server is overloaded or being attacked or being punished by ISP etc, all your sites will be affected. Especially when the server is punished by some big groups like google, you're in risk of loosing most online business and you will do lots of work to be friendly again to google.

Multiple support means there're many websites served on the same server. Not just you but also many other clients will put more than one site to hosting account. The final result is heavy loading server is produced and its overall performance is downgraded. For most $1 or $2 monthly service, their servers are heavily oversold in order to be profitable. This is something we should avoid when looking for a high performance service.

How to choose the right service provider?

As multiple domain hosting is supported by most service providers, it's a big chanllenge for us to find the right hosting provider. However, we should always remember the popular saying "you get what you pay". If you just pay one or two bucks for the service then you should not expect $5/mo support. Sometimes, it's very important to know how much you need exactly. For example if you would like to host 5 websites then you can search for 5 support plan directly instead a vague "multiple" term.

There're several leading hosting providers who support exact ammount domain names instead a simple multiple or unlimited. For example Arvixe and Inmotion groups. Their starter plans will tell you the exact domains you can host per account. The most important point is they don't oversell their space in order to be profitable more. Customer support and stable performance are their top concern.

A2 Hosting Reviews

A2 hosting reviews

About A2 Hosting Group

A2 Hosting is a privately owned web hosting company with rich feature hosting plans configured on leading server structures. The company was known as Iniquinet before 2001 and renamed to current brand in 2003. Their name a2 is simply based their physical address "Ann Arbor" in Michigan. The mission of A2 hosting is to deliver super reliable and high performance service to individual and enterprise web applications.

A2 Hosting Plans Features

A2 Hosting provides pretty standard web hosting plans including shared, vps, reseller and dedicated hosting. The company highlight their service by offering leading server features and performance for each clients. Unlike all other hosting groups who just provides 99% server uptime guarantee in simple words, A2 hosting shows all their server status publicly on website so visitors can judge by themselves how their servers are performing.

Basically, the A2 hosting servers uptime stats is 99+%. They managed doing so simply because of their powerful hardware specs and advanced management technologies. All their servers are brand new DELL products with cloudlinux installation. The most important is they don't oversell the server space so all their efforts can produce out expected results. The A2 hosting leading plan features are provided as following

Unlimited offers
Most features from A2 hosting are provided unlimited like most popular providers. Account storage, data transfer, domains/subdomains, database and email accounts etc are provided with no limitation. As long as you're not flooding your account space, you can use as more as you can.

Developer friendly
A2 is absolutely one of the most developer friendly hosting provider. Every server is installed 4 versions php and most programming frameworks like perl, ruby on rails, postgresql and python etc. SSH is also supported for each customer account so you can connect to server space directly via command line.

Fast server speed
Just like what they explained on their hosting site, they use the same server for hosting their own website. Their efforts in speeding up hosting servers including 10 GB redundant networks, 8 core server, minimum 24 GB RAM plus free Cloud Flare CDN support, Railgun Optimizer (load HTML 140+ % faster), and multiple server locations between U.S. and E.U. A2 is also one of the very few hosting service who uses SSD drive which is approved to be 300% faster than traditional hard disk.

a2hosting fast server

Server rewind
Server Rewind helps easily restore your data from saved snapshots when recovery is necessary. The service is accessible from hosting control panel and provided 100% free! You can recovery a single file or entire account by few clicks. The service is running background automatically so you don't have to manually configure it. Just call it when you need to recover something.

Affordable price
A2 hosting service can be as cheap as $3.95/mo for 36 months subscription. Yearly subscription for prime plan is only $4.97/mo after official 17% discount! Pretty affordable! Please note, SSD support is not configured as default, you can either sign up via additional $3/mo or sign up Prime+SSD plan which has SSD included for free. 

a2hosting features

Besides all above advantages, A2 hosting is also one of the very few affordable SSD vps provider. You can fully customize your SSD vps setup to fulfill your server requirements. Means you don't pay extra for something you don't need so each penny will put on the service you need exactly.

A2hosting official site: http://www.a2hosting.com

About A2 Hosting Support

A2 Hosting claims that all staff are developers and available 24/7 every day of the year. Instead to put all support staff into an office, they take home based work environment as part of their green strategy. Their free work style is very similar to arvixe hosting who even doesn't have a headquater.

A2 provides hosting support in multiple channels including toll-free phone calls, live chat and ticket. Their people also constructed a resourceful FAQ knowledge base and very active in social media communities like twitter, facebook and various web forums. All their effort is to make the support simple and easy.

Do we recommend?

Basically, There's no much difference in common service features comparing to lots of popular hosting groups. The biggest advantage with A2 is their leading server setup and no overselling policy. Besides all available features from traditional hosting service, they even proudly show up all server on going uptime stats to approve their confidence in maintaining a powerful and healthy server. A2 is highly recommended hosting when you need high performance web server and quick file recovery service.

Last but not least, don't forget they provide very affordable deal for each service plan. Starts from 17%, you can always claim the best price without searching anywhere else outside their official site.