|
If you need a Web host to support your family's genealogy site and nothing more, you might be OK with a freebie--its slower speeds and occasional downtime won't matter much in the scheme of things. But when you want to take your small business online, you need a host with an outstanding track record. Amazingly, hundreds of reliable hosting services offer Web space and e-mail, with prices ranging from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per month. So how do you choose the right host for your business? To help you narrow the playing field, we've selected only the top performers from NetMechanic's server-reliability tests. From that group, we weeded out the services that charged more than $15 per month. Next, we kicked out any host that didn't offer a 30-day, money-back guarantee and round-the-clock technical support. And we demanded enough Web and e-mail capacity for a growing business: at least 10 POP e-mailboxes, 50MB of Web site storage, and the ability to support at least 3GB of monthly traffic. Only four services met our aggressive requirements: ODSOL.com's Standard Hosting, Globat's GigabytePackage, iPowerWeb's Business Package, and LunarPages' Standard package. These services pass the NetMechanic server-reliability tests at 99.8 percent or higher, and each comes with all the bells and whistles that a fledgling online business needs. Read on to find out which one is right for you. How we tested?We tested only hosts whose servers seldom go down--those that were up more than 99.8 percent of the time, according to NetMechanic server-reliability tests in the weeks leading up to our review. In other words, we knew that Web server downtime would not be an issue. However, server-reliability tests do not measure the speed of Web servers. So, we used a suite of NetMechanic tests that monitor server response and download times. These tests measure the time it takes for a Web server to respond to a ping from another server and the duration of a small download. We repeated the tests on different days and at different times. We used less formal benchmarking for testing e-mail hosting. We monitored each domain's e-mail accounts to see if the servers refused any send or receive sessions or held onto messages. And the winner is ...We selected only the crème de la crème among low-cost, high-performance Web hosts, but even among the top tier, we found poor server response times, lackluster features, and hidden fees. The takeaway? Small businesses looking for an inexpensive Web host, beware: the market is a moving target. Although it's far from perfect, ODSOL Premium Web Hosting offers the best overall service among the $15-and-under group. You get a generous allowance of POP mailboxes and monthly data transfer. Plus, it's delightfully easy to configure and get started. Even though its servers aren't the speediest, ODSOL succeeds where the others fail: its tech support is rock solid. Beginners should give this service a go. Tell me more about why ODSOL is so good. ODSOL Premium Web Hosting has a lot going for it: free SSL so that your visitors can enter credit card numbers and other data securely, FrontPage 2002 extensions; large POP-mailbox and monthly data-transfer allowances; and around-the-clock technical support. Moreover, ODSOL offers 45 days money back guarantee, the strongest guarantee we've ever seen in the web hosting industry. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Take
your business online: we review four low cost, small-business
Web hosts.
