HostMonster has been delivering web hosting since 1996, along with their sister company BlueHost, and have developed a reputation as one of top handful of web hosting companies on the web. They are consistently rated as one of the top five hosts out there. There are many reasons why. Chief among them are their reputation for good customer service, as well as a feature-rich environment. Let’s look at some of the reasons why people host their sites at HostMonster.
Web Hosting Features – There are a wide range of useful features on all HostMonster web hosting accounts. Among these are multiple domain hosting (you are able to host unlimited domains in one account), cPanel (demo available), supports international domain names, two different web based email solutions, Fantastico script support, bulletin board (message forum), PHP Nuke, blogging platforms, image galleries, web auctions, help center/support ticket, SSL Secure Server, OS Commerce Shopping Cart, MySQL Databases, PostgreSQL Databases, CGI-BIN, CGI Library, PHP Version 4 or 5 (your choice), Perl 5 support, Ruby/Ruby On Rails v1.1, server side includes Frontpage 2000/2002/2003 extensions, Shell Access (SSH), Log files + site stats, supports streaming video and audio, search engine submission, search engine position report, password protected directories, Spam Assassin protection and much, much more!
The Fantastico scripts include the latest versions of applications like blogging platforms b2evolution Nucleus, pMachine Free, WordPress, other content management systems (CMS) solutions like Drupal, Geeklog, Joomla, Mambo Open Source, PHP-Nuke, phpWCMS, phpWebSite, Post-Nuke, TYPO3, Xoops. There are also ecommerce applications like CubeCart, OS Commerce, Zen Cart, as well as dozens of other useful apps.
HostMonster is also known as one of the more reasonable web hosting solutions out there, with prices starting as low as $3.95 per month in some plans. They offer “unlimited” space, bandwidth and domains.
Some of the less attractive aspects of hosting with HostMonster have to do with the “unlimited” feature noted above. This is a new trend with web hosting companies that is less than honest. When you reach a certain level of traffic and usage of resources, you will find that HostMonster will engage what is known as “domain throttling”, which is a reduction of resources available to your site. Soon thereafter you will be not so gently encouraged to upgrade your plan to restore full domain availability. HostMonster and BlueHost were the first major hosting companies to institute this, and it is more than a bit unsettling. You need to make some decisions about your level of comfort with this before signing on the dotted line. This alone makes a recommending an otherwise good hosting company difficult.
There are a number of clients who swear by HostMonster, and also those who feel as though they’ve been burned. Take some time to read through the reviews out there before you decide. Like any of the hosting companies out there, there is good along with the bad. HostMonster has a lot of good things to recommend it, and a few not so good as well. Choose your host wisely!
