Recommended Webhosting Solutions for Indian Individuals
Thursday, January 18, 2007
I've been with a few web-hosts over the last 3 years. Opinions on web-hosting companies will always vary from one individual to another based on a million factors. If you want to swim in the ocean of web-hosting discussions/opinions/views/comments/experiences dive into WebHostingTalk (WBT) - You can't find a better place to research.
Here is a list of low-budget quality shared web-hosting solutions that I would recommend for Indian individuals, startups, students, experimenters and developers who want to build a small or medium size dynamic website. I use the first two for my personal websites. The others I've been on, were either my clients' or friend's. Theres no rating and all that - just good ones IMHO.
This is one provider that probably has 0 negative reviews at WBT. The guy behind this, Tim Dorr, has been upfront on everything.
The best (and probably most attractive) part of this is that there are only 2 limits on their schemes - space and data transfer.
Everything else is unlimited - additional websites using the same package, unlimited FTP users, MySQL databases, subdomains, parked-domains etc etc.
For $25/yr for 75MB space is an excellent place to start your site. Upgrading for more space and bandwidth at a later stage is just a matter of extending your limits.
Their support team has been prompt on service and even customizes your shared space to your needs on request. For example, SSH is available on requesting for it. I asked to enable whois and on giving the reason to use whois, it got enabled - as long as it does not violate any TOS or abuse the whois server. ASO does look like a soft target for the wrong kind of people though. I don't know how they intend to prevent that. Trust over long-term customer relationship ?
Missing : Support for other databases like PostgreSQL
This German host did not really receive a very good name at WBT when U2Mike got sold. U2Mike customers were frustrated over the move for various reasons, but the one thing that they were totally pissed off about was that control panels got changed (from DirectAdmin to Plesk) when Padberg-IT's owner decided to get the customers to move all the websites to his server and thrash U2Mike's since he felt the latter were not profitable. Anyway, thats history.
What I like about this host is that they keep updating their software version to the latest. Current PHP version running is 5.2.0-7. Even though Peter gave one month notice, non-developers wouldn't have been happy when PHP 5 replaced version 4 long ago. Recently, MySQL got upgraded to version 5.0 was another great move.
Also: Apache 2.0, Tomcat 4.1, Firebird/InterBase Support, PostgreSQL 7.4.7, Shared SSL, Apache ASP support, mod_perl, mod_python, fast CGI.
For 1GB webspace + 1GB email space at $46 for 2 yrs, this is really a good deal esp for web-developers.
Now, the biggest downside is that they update so often that almost every month the tech-guys spend hours updating and as a result the site is down for a couple of hours every month - though I've not faced critical downtimes so far. I've noticed that they've always been very tight on security. And their German to English email-translations is not all that good.
This is recommended to only those who are really into web-programming and not blindly dependent on a CMS. If use using a 3rd party script, make sure you know how to tweak it to make it work on PHP5 or get the PHP5 equivalent.
Missing : SSH
My friend, who runs his own firm has a number of sites hosted at WebStrikeSolutions and won't even budge from this one. I've seen that their service is of really high quality and provides both Linux and Windows hosting. The costs are a bit on the high-end at $84 a year (or $66/yr for more than 1 website using the same account) even if you intend to use only 100MB of web-space. [ The 1st year's charges are only $30 ]
Provides PHP5, MySQL, JSP, SSL, Perl 5 and ASP .NET 2.0 (for the Windows box). MS SQL Server is at an extra cost though they could've included MS SQL Server 2005 Express for free.
The Aussies behind this are real good techies so tech support won't be an issue. They have their own in-house control panel which is good in one way as they control the scene.
Recommended to .NET developers, or who got clients who require windows-web-applications or really needs that much space and bandwidth.
Biggest downside : Just a single pre-defined package for all.
If you ever wanted a small single dynamic website and with limited resources, at $20/yr for 500MB space, this should be your best bet.
They use RHEL 4.0 OS and their rest of their schemes have unlimited features (except on space and bandwidth) like ASmallOrange. If you're looking to host a lot of websites which requires more space than ASO, this is a better option. But if you're sites gonna be resource intensive, any host will kick you out from a shared space. In such a case, ASO's move to their VPS would be smoother. Both ASO and TSP have very similar features including RubyOnRails support but I would say TSP is best for non-techies and ASO for developers.
The best part of TSP is their low-budget reseller plans !
Missing: VPS, Dedicated
This is one provider that probably has 0 negative reviews at WBT. The guy behind this, Tim Dorr, has been upfront on everything.
The best (and probably most attractive) part of this is that there are only 2 limits on their schemes - space and data transfer.
Everything else is unlimited - additional websites using the same package, unlimited FTP users, MySQL databases, subdomains, parked-domains etc etc.
For $25/yr for 75MB space is an excellent place to start your site. Upgrading for more space and bandwidth at a later stage is just a matter of extending your limits.
Their support team has been prompt on service and even customizes your shared space to your needs on request. For example, SSH is available on requesting for it. I asked to enable whois and on giving the reason to use whois, it got enabled - as long as it does not violate any TOS or abuse the whois server. ASO does look like a soft target for the wrong kind of people though. I don't know how they intend to prevent that. Trust over long-term customer relationship ?
Missing : Support for other databases like PostgreSQL
This German host did not really receive a very good name at WBT when U2Mike got sold. U2Mike customers were frustrated over the move for various reasons, but the one thing that they were totally pissed off about was that control panels got changed (from DirectAdmin to Plesk) when Padberg-IT's owner decided to get the customers to move all the websites to his server and thrash U2Mike's since he felt the latter were not profitable. Anyway, thats history.
What I like about this host is that they keep updating their software version to the latest. Current PHP version running is 5.2.0-7. Even though Peter gave one month notice, non-developers wouldn't have been happy when PHP 5 replaced version 4 long ago. Recently, MySQL got upgraded to version 5.0 was another great move.
Also: Apache 2.0, Tomcat 4.1, Firebird/InterBase Support, PostgreSQL 7.4.7, Shared SSL, Apache ASP support, mod_perl, mod_python, fast CGI.
For 1GB webspace + 1GB email space at $46 for 2 yrs, this is really a good deal esp for web-developers.
Now, the biggest downside is that they update so often that almost every month the tech-guys spend hours updating and as a result the site is down for a couple of hours every month - though I've not faced critical downtimes so far. I've noticed that they've always been very tight on security. And their German to English email-translations is not all that good.
This is recommended to only those who are really into web-programming and not blindly dependent on a CMS. If use using a 3rd party script, make sure you know how to tweak it to make it work on PHP5 or get the PHP5 equivalent.
Missing : SSH
My friend, who runs his own firm has a number of sites hosted at WebStrikeSolutions and won't even budge from this one. I've seen that their service is of really high quality and provides both Linux and Windows hosting. The costs are a bit on the high-end at $84 a year (or $66/yr for more than 1 website using the same account) even if you intend to use only 100MB of web-space. [ The 1st year's charges are only $30 ]
Provides PHP5, MySQL, JSP, SSL, Perl 5 and ASP .NET 2.0 (for the Windows box). MS SQL Server is at an extra cost though they could've included MS SQL Server 2005 Express for free.
The Aussies behind this are real good techies so tech support won't be an issue. They have their own in-house control panel which is good in one way as they control the scene.
Recommended to .NET developers, or who got clients who require windows-web-applications or really needs that much space and bandwidth.
Biggest downside : Just a single pre-defined package for all.
If you ever wanted a small single dynamic website and with limited resources, at $20/yr for 500MB space, this should be your best bet.
They use RHEL 4.0 OS and their rest of their schemes have unlimited features (except on space and bandwidth) like ASmallOrange. If you're looking to host a lot of websites which requires more space than ASO, this is a better option. But if you're sites gonna be resource intensive, any host will kick you out from a shared space. In such a case, ASO's move to their VPS would be smoother. Both ASO and TSP have very similar features including RubyOnRails support but I would say TSP is best for non-techies and ASO for developers.
The best part of TSP is their low-budget reseller plans !
Missing: VPS, Dedicated
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