Finally, MY HOST: Hostmonster!

After regaling you all with the various horror, horror-er, and not-so-horrific web hosts I bounced around to and from for my official portfolio site, finally I reveal who I decided to go with, to much satisfaction: Hostmonster.

6.95 a month is, in my opinion, on the high end of "budget hosting" solutions (those including sites that offer 9.95 A YEAR), especially since you pay for a full year up front. However, it's become more than worth it.

First of all, for every account, you get one free domain, registered in your name for as long as you keep your account with them. With domains costing about 7.95 a year, that's like getting 66 cents off per month. Of course, I already had my own domain, so I just went and used the extra free domain name to finally register my name.

Secondly, Hostmonster offers the latest version of CPanel, which, if you may remember, was a dealbreaker for me. Cpanel lets me administer the backend of my site in a user-friendly manner, and I've come to be dependent on it for years now.

Thirdly, Hostmonster offers all of the PHP and CGI script capabilities that I needed to run my site, another thing that ixwebhosting did not have at the time I used their service.

Fourthly, and perhaps most importantly, Hostmonster also offers 24/7 phone tech support. I'd had to call them once and emailed them once with questions about setting my site up, and they responded promptly and courteously. I still think ixwebhosting's support is better, but I really doubt now that I'd be hit with a serious emergency that would need me to call at 3 in the morning on a holiday.

And finally, Hostmonster offers a whopping 1.5 TERABYTES of hosting space, and 15 TERABYTES of bandwidth per month! Yes, I know other sites had offered unlimited space, but for some reason having specific limits on space and bandwidth seem more comforting than having none at all. I've heard of hosts shutting down sites for excessive space and bandwidth even if they were told they would be unlimited, mainly because the hosts never really intended to give them limitless bandwidth, more like "as much as we can handle until we think you're using too much."

1.5 terabytes of space?? I calculated it, at my upload rate of 60 KB/sec, I can upload 216 megabytes an hour, and 5 gigabytes in 24 hours. At that rate, it would take me 289 DAYS of straight uploading to fill up the site! Hell, I can back up my entire computer more than twice over (and is something I'm seriously considering).

*Update: using the server as backup is against their Terms of Service. DO NOT DO THIS, I learned the hard way.

Anyway, I picked Hostmonster after reading its stellar reviews, and carefully checking its features list. I've been hosting with them for two and a half months now and I haven't had an issue with them yet. I highly recommend them.

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