The soldierer.com web site is hosted on a hostmonster.com web server. I decided to try Hostmonster because I read a couple positive experiences on the web. Three weeks after opening the account I have to agree to everything I read and give them a positive review, too.
Hostmonster provides a powerful LAMP hosting environment with high quality services at a very competitive price.
Looking at what Hostmonster offers, I must say that web hosting has come a long way. For my very first web hosting account on a shared server at Hiway Technologies back in 1995 I had to pay $25 per month. Storage and bandwidth were very limited, but Hiway supported Perl cgi scripts. I joined their “HiwayTalk” mailing list to discuss hosting issues and together with fellow list member Phillip Eby I spotted and reported a security issue on the Hiway server later known as
“the hole big enough to drive a truck through”
While I continued to develop the All-Yours.net online greeting card system, Phil Eby was offered a job at Hiway and seems to still work for Verio, the large ISP that bought Hiway for some 100 million several years later. I checked Hostmonster.com, their server does not have the truck hole.
When bandwidth limits became an issue, I opened a hosting account at Internet Quality Services in Las Vegas. The All-Yours system had grown considerably and I had to quickly move everything to dedicated servers. IQS had many more hosting features than Hiway at the time, but everything had to be set up manually using Telnet.
None of the services I have seen so far compares to Hostmonster:
Noteworthy features
- Configure your hosting account with the Cpanel tool which provides easy access to all account settings. Check out the sample account on hostmonster.com to see how it works.
- 3000 gb/mo transfer and 300 gb storage
- Perl, PHP, and Ruby on Rails, with interfaces to install additional modules (CPAN…)
- Configure multiple cron tabs. I set one up to run a Perl script every hour. The script emails me if a technical problem makes the data on my photovoltage report look strange.
- many pre-configured scripts and software packages (content management, blogging…)
- Up to 20 MySQL or PostgreSQL databases
- unlimited POP and IMAP email accounts with 2 different Webmail interfaces
- SpamAssassin and BoxTrapper
- Easy configuration (custom 404 pages, redirects, .htaccess, password protection, Apache handlers, MIME types…)
Price
- I got the $4.95/mo special offer for 24 months, the regular price is $5.95 .
Service
- I logged 3 support issues so far and they were all fully answered within less than 1 day.
Performance/reliability
- No problems so far. If you need to serve lots of dynamic pages, Hostmonster lets you set up FastCGI for PHP scripts.
Disclaimer: This review reflects my personal opinion. If the web hosting features mentioned above do not make sense to you, Hostmonster probably offers more than you actually need. I do not have a special account at Hostmonster. I did not talk to them about this review. I did not join any Hostmonster affiliate programs, so I won’t get anything if you click the links in this post.