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Here is my promised review of HostMonster, based on my 4 years of experience with them. I have had no experience with any other hosting companies so I can not provide any comparisons, only information on my experiences with HostMonster. If I haven’t covered anything here then feel free to comment and I’ll get around to answering the question when I can.

Support

First I’ll start off with their support, which I had experience with several times. Living in Australia means that calling a support line isn’t very feasible, when I initially chose my host (back in 2005) support was a key deciding factor and HostMonster’s support was (in my experience) a very professional and helpful one. The live chat service was the best support I have ever experienced – often it took less than two minutes to be connected to someone, who more often-than-not could promptly answer my question, or solve my problem. Additionally, for those typical accounting questions, and other common questions their Support Centre had the answer.

Pricing

You can see on their Hosting Features page a breakdown of their service. I would like to point out that all those unlimited services are truly (or as close as it gets, while still having a numeric value) unlimited (yes storage, transfers, domains, sub-domains and email addresses are unlimited). Here is a breakdown of pricing (accurate at time of writing – it appears that they have a special on at the moment, I will update this when it is over):
12 Months: $5.95 (per month) * 12 = $71.40
24 Months: $5.95 (per month) * 24 = $142.80
36 Months: $5.95 (per month) * 36 = $214.20
There is only one plan offered so that is a flat price that includes everything shown on the Hosting Features page, one free domain (for as long as you have hosting with them), free whois privacy and no set-up fee. HostMonster also provides several addon services:

• Additional Domain Names = $10.00 each year
• Dedicated IP = $30.00 each year [$2.50 mo.]
• SSL Certificates = $45.00 each year
• Postini Mail Filtering = $1.00/mo per e-mail address [prorated]

I only had experience with the additional domain name, which was a very convenient service allowing me to manage two domains through the one interface (additionally if you already own a domain then you can point it to HostMonster’s DNS servers for free, or transfer it at $10 per year).

Service

Overall HostMonster’s service was fantastic. The unlimited disk space and transfers was one of the greatest services around. The transfer speeds was often very good, averaging ~2mbps from their servers. The script processing time was speedy and really what you would expect (nothing too special, or too slow). However, being on a shared server if you hog the server’s resources you will find your account being suspended until you can prove that the issue has been resolved (often it’s an overly popular file, or a buggy script).

They run the latest version of cPanel (11.25.0 – at time of writing), which has a very nice customisable UI, and some very advanced controls – allowing for some very advanced options to be changed. The best demonstration of their control panel is their Demo Panel, which is exactly what a real customer gets.

They provide 100 MySQL and PostgreSQL databases respectively, which makes hosting forums, blogs, etc very easy to do. They additionally provide PHP5, Perl, Python, Ruby and Ruby on Rails; I however only have experience with their support for PHP, which was as you would expect from any top host. They allow access to your files through FTP, SSH (although you have no send in photo ID to enable) and through the control panel. Finally they allow access to email through POP3, IMAP, RoundCube, SquirrelMail and Horde, and the ability to send emails through SMTP and the aforementioned webmail clients.

Summary

Overall I was extremely happy with HostMonster’s service, support and pricing. I have moved over to self hosting, but this isn’t due to HostMonster – I changed primarily because I wanted more flexibility in how I run my domain, and to have full control on what services I run through my domain. I would highly recommend HostMonster too everyone with any level of experience, their exceptional support, impressive pricing and features and their overall professional and functional service makes HostMonster a brilliant host.

Well, I’ve done what I predicted.. I haven’t used the blog at all. I think I’ll make an attempt at it again. I think this weekend I’ll post up a review of my old host (HostMonster), however I shall begin tonight by doing up some info on the about page and sorting out some categories for these posts.

My aim for the blog is to document some things I’m doing, hopefully provide some help to someone and also maybe post up some interesting news that I hear around the places. Well that’s the aim anyway, but knowing my track record I’ll fail soon.

I have now changed to self-hosting my blog and site. It costs much less, gives me more flexibility however it doesn’t give me as much storage or bandwidth, but sacrifices have to be made!