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Thinkhost Review

Looking For Shared Green Web Hosting? Beware of Thinkhost

As much as I try to avoid negative reviews, I couldn’t get away from this one. I stumbled on this host when reviewing for the main website. On the surface, they looked decent. However, as I dug deeper, a number of red flags jumped out at me.

The first was the fact that no contact telephone number is listed anywhere on the site. A little more digging and it turns out they don’t offer phone support at all. They only have an online ticket system with a 24-48 hour response time. Compared to other webhosts, this is appalling. The “standard” today is 24/7 live phone and chat support as well as a ticket system with <24 hour response/resolution time.

The second red flag is their list of servers. There are only 4 of them! Two of them are Pentium 4’s, which were current just over 3 years ago, and have 1-2 GB of RAM. The other 2 are 3 GHz Xeon Dual Cores with 4 GB of RAM. This is better, but not enough. With this setup, they have to be oversold.

Overselling on a shared server basically means they sell more accounts than they have the hardware to support. Webhosts that do this bet that most website owners will not come close to their allocated bandwidth/storage/server resource limits and sell to what they believe will be used. This means if some of the websites have a high traffic day, the total bandwidth or server resource limits are exceeded. This translates to every website on that server slowing down. In the worst case, some sites become so slow they are unusable or go down altogether. Situations like this are simply unacceptable to web businesses.

To see if my suspicions were true, I looked up some reviews. With no surprise, I discovered exactly what I expected – countless customers complaining about website instability, downtime and poor customer service. This was almost across the board for all the reviews. I was only able to find a handful of reviews that were positive.

I am typically cautious about negative reviews for a few reasons. First, the reviewer may have had a bad experience because of their inexperience. Second, some folks try to do things on their hosting accounts that the service is not set up for (always read the terms of service and plan details!). Third, they may start off their support contact with an attitude, which doesn’t exactly make anyone want to help them.

However, with Thinkhost, what struck me was the consistency of the complaints. With any webhost, you will typically see a smattering of bad reviews relating to various areas like billing, refunds, problems getting started and difficulties getting a site to work. In this case, almost every reviewer across 4 years (2006 through 2010) talked about their sites loading slowly, not working reliably and customer service being poor and unresponsive.

Based on the information on their website, the lack of a contact phone number, their server hardware quantity and age, and the consistently bad reviews, we can’t recommend Thinkhost. If you are looking for high-quality, environmentally responsible “green” hosting, try GreenGeeks or Hostgator instead.

IX Webhosting Coupon Codes

IX Webhosting Is Celebrating Their New Website

IX Webhosting just launched their brand new website. To celebrate, they have lowered the price of their most popular hosting plan to $3.95 per month. How do you take advantage of this offer? Simple – just visit IX Webhosting and sign up… that’s all you have to do to get this phenomenal deal.

There is also a secret link somewhere on the IX Webhosting homepage that will get you an additional 20% discount on your hosting first hosting term (applicable to new customers and applies to 1, 2 or 3 year billing only). They want visitors to find it on their own, so I’m not going to tell you exactly where it is, but I will give you a hint: it’s where other small navigation links are typically found.

They could change these discounts at any time. If you’re interested in IX Webhosting as your next webhost visit IX Webhosting today to jump on these deals.

Ongoing Hostgator Coupon Codes

Gifts From The Best Web Host Out There – Hostgator!

One thing I love about Hostgator is that they automatically include their current coupon code (usually 20% off your first month of hosting) in your new hosting order. You don’t have to search for it or type it in – it automatically appears after you select your billing cycle.

The 20% off coupon can be used by new and existing customers. It only applies to new orders, and only includes the months of hosting (not domain registrations) that are part of your initial order. If you sign up for more than one month on the shared plans, they actually do discount all of the months. How cool is that?!

We have a great Hostgator coupon code for MyMultiHost.com visitors!
The coupon code is MYMULTIHOST and it takes $9.94 off any new hosting purchase by a new customer.

Hostgator Hosting for a penny?

The MYMULTIHOST Hostgator coupon code gets you your first month of their Baby hosting plan for only a penny. This lets you try Hostgator risk free and it’s a great deal. There is no catch either – you get all of the features offered in their Baby shared hosting plan, including the 45-day money-back guarantee on your penny. Just remember to enter the coupon code at checkout (this one is not automatic!).

This is just one of the many, many reasons Hostgator is our top rated host. Check them out today for only a penny for your first month of hosting!

My Newbie Web Hosting Mistake

What I Didn’t Know About My Webhost Did Hurt Me

When I first started out online 8 years ago, the entire hosting landscape was different. Multiple domain hosting (or unlimited domain hosting) was only offered by a few providers. It was more expensive than it is today. To even have multiple domains, there was a good chance you would end up with a reseller account.

After doing (what I thought was) good research on available hosting companies, I decided on a multiple domain shared hosting plan. Now, I’m not going to name the company because the plan has changed greatly since 2002. So while the plan may not exist anymore, my experience is still just as relevant today as it was then.

Overall, this host was just as good as I thought. My websites loaded quickly, they had good customer support, my site was rarely down and they had all of the features I needed… so I thought.

When I went to put up my second website on a new domain, I went through cPanel and set everything up. It worked fine, until I got to the email. You see when you register for unlimited domain shared hosting, you start with a primary domain. Add-on domains are just forwarded subdomains of your main domain.

Let’s say you have www.mysite.com and www.secondsite.com, where www.mysite.com is your primary domain. The world will see these as independent domains. Your server sees your add-on site as secondsite.mysite.com, which is a subdomain of your primary website.

How does this relate to email? Well, as it turned out, all of my emails could only be sent via my primary domain. Even though I could have an email account for each domain, they were receive-only – except for email accounts tied to my primary domain. Email for add-on domains were really just forwarding accounts that used my other domain emails as email aliases of my main domain accounts.

Cutting through the jargon, I could send and receive email using email@mysite.com. I could receive email using email@secondsite.com. If I needed to send email, it would always be sent from @mysite.com. That means I didn’t have independent email accounts for each of my sites.

Imagine having 2 different businesses that are completely unrelated (like one about computers and the other about specialty cheeses) and trying to use the same email address for both. It was horrible! I had to resort to using a hotmail address for outgoing mail on my second website. It looked unprofessional and I’m sure it cost me some business.

Needless to say, this didn’t last long and I left the host. Upon further inspection deep in their operating agreement, I found the statement (convoluted with legalese and industry-speak) about the email. Man did I feel dumb. Not to mention the hassle of transferring my sites to my new host.

That’s why it’s so important to know what you need in a host and do your homework to make sure they have it – even if it seems like a picky little thing. I know I’m opening myself up to get ragged on here, but what do you think about this? Have you had any similar experiences? (I’m sure I can’t be alone on this, but hearing your story would make me feel better!)

The Key To Web Hosting Success

The One Key Characteristic Your Webhost Must Have If You Want A Successful Website

There is one thing that you must have in a web host, no matter what level of hosting you need. This key component is not advertised on their websites and you won’t find it in their FAQs or knowledgebases. Some reviewers may even gloss over this critical element.

What is this cornerstone to a quality web host? Reliability.

Some may call this uptime, others may say it’s website load time and still others may say it’s control panel functionality. The truth is it’s all of these things.

When I say reliability, I mean that a good web host must:

  • Have an uptime guarantee of >99% and stand behind it (it’s one thing to make the claim, but it’s a whole other thing to live up to it!)
  • An average website must load quickly (but don’t blame the host for slow load times if you have a huge page with 50 full size photos, a bunch of video or tons of scripting!)
  • Your hosting control panel should be available >99% of the time and not break or be overly sluggish.
  • You should be able to upload files to your account via FTP quickly and easily. (A 25kb HTML page should upload in a few seconds or less over a broadband connection using an up-to-date computer. If it takes minutes, something is wrong.)

Downtime just plain hurts. Whenever your site is down, that’s time you won’t be making money or getting visitors. Now, we have to be realistic about uptime. A 31 day month has 44,640 minutes. If a host guarantees 99.9% uptime, on average and at worst, your site will be down 44 minutes and 39 seconds per month.

A more typical scenario, however, is that a [good] host will have 100% uptime most months and end up with about 2 hours or less of outages across a given year.

On the other hand, excessive downtime can kill your business. It’s not just that your site is unavailable for potential customers. Your site could start to gain a reputation for being unreliable. This can be especially damaging to an ecommerce site. Who wants to give their credit card number to a site that goes down at random? It would make you look unprofessional and drive away business. The same is true for consistently slow loading pages (always make sure nothing on the page itself is malfunctioning!).

So what can you do to prevent this? It’s all about reputation. Read reviews. Visit sites that are hosted by the host you are looking at and see how fast they load. Look at their terms of service to see if they stand behind their uptime guarantee.

All nine hosts that made the MyMultiHost.com top web hosting quality list have independently measured 99.95% uptime or better – five of the nine have independently measured uptime of 99.99%.

Do you have any uptime horror stories to share? Have you used any webhosts who didn’t live up to their reliability guarantees?

The Cheap Hosting Catch

Cheap Web Hosting May Not Be As Cheap As You Thought

Have you ever looked for a cheap web host? It may be for cost reasons, a personal website or a test website that we want separate from our main sites. Whatever the reason, the allure of unlimited hosting for $5.95 or even $3.95 per month can be hard to resist. The problem is that cheap web hosting may not be as cheap as it appears on the surface.

To get that low price, you almost always have to sign up for 2 years or more. That means you pay for those years up front. So instead of spending, let’s say, $3.95 per month, you actually have to pay $142.20 for the 3 year plan right at the beginning.

If you want to go for 2 years, you end up paying $4.95 per month. That’s $118.80 up front. Going down to 1 year, that’s $71.40 up front at $5.95 per year. To have your hosting billed monthly, the price goes up to $7.95 per month plus an initial setup fee of up to $35.

So, our cheap web hosting at $3.95 turned out to be $7.95 per month plus a setup fee. Additionally, some hosts don’t even offer monthly billing anymore. Their minimum signup is 3 months or even 1 year. If cost will be a deciding factor in the host you pick, try to find one that has no setup fee if you pay monthly.

Most hosts have a money back guarantee. So if you leave, they should refund the balance. However, if that hosting came with a free domain, they could deduct up to $35 if you leave. They may also raise your rate to that of a shorter term if you leave early. So, if you left your 3 year contract after 1 year, you may be charged the 1 year rate and refunded less. Not to mention the hassle of getting a refund in general.

Remember, all of this information has to be in their terms of service. Always read it before you sign up!

The long-term low price can be a great deal if you are certain you will stay with that host. However, it can be tough paying in full at the beginning. Laying out the cash at the beginning is also a risk since you have not tried their service.

If you are new to the web or won’t need hosting for that long, this is no deal at all. Also, especially for business (ecommerce and internet marketing), what happens if you leave because you need to upgrade? Hopefully your business will grow steadily over time and you will need higher capacity hosting sooner than 2 years from when you start. Locking into a 3 year plan may make that transition more troublesome than it should be.

It’s my feeling that for those starting out on the web, with business or personal websites, it’s better to pay month to month. Once you are established, know your business’s direction and have a host you know is good, then sign up for a longer term.

So, have you signed up for a cheap hosting account and found out they weren’t as cheap as they advertised (or as good)?

GreenGeeks is Now the Official “Drupal For Dummies” Web Host

GreenGeeks is Now the Go-To Company for Drupal Hosting

Drupal is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) website building platforms. Drupal For Dummies is one of the latest in the series of For Dummies books by Wiley Publishing Inc.

The release of the Drupal For Dummies help book by Lynn Beighley is expected to help thousands of people learn how to use the widely popular Drupal content management system to build out their sites. GreenGeeks, now the official web hosting company for the Drupal for Dummies book, will be there to help make it even easier.

GreenGeeks servers are perfectly configured for the current version of Drupal (Version 6) and for the next version (version 7). Their commitment to Drupal hosting customers extends to custom video tutorials as well as where to go to learn Drupal Site Building, Site Structure and Administration Guides. They have even created a GreenGeeks Drupal Quick Starter Guide.

“I chose GreenGeeks.com to be the home of my Drupal For Dummies Web site because of their great customer support and excellent control panel. The hardest part of creating a Drupal site is getting Drupal installed. As a GreenGeeks customer, you can have your first Drupal site running in less than five minutes!” said Lynn Beighley, author of Drupal For Dummies.

GreenGeeks hosts the DrupalForDummies.com web site and is featured in the Drupal For Dummies help guide.
“We are very excited to have worked with Lynn as she wrote the book and we are excited to be a part of the Drupal community” says Trey Gardner CEO of GreenGeeks “Drupal is an ever growing part of our customer base as more and more people learn the merits of the Drupal program. We expect Lynn’s book to become a huge success in enabling many thousands of people learn Drupal and create terrific CMS driven web sites.”

So what makes GreenGeeks a top Drupal webhost?

For $6.95 per month, their EcoSite plan gives you:

  • Unlimited Web Space
  • Unlimited Data Transfer (bandwidth)
  • FREE AUTO Drupal Script Installer
  • FREE Domain for Life
  • Unlimited Hosted Domains on 1 Account
  • Own PHP.INI for customized PHP settings
  • 300% Green Hosting – Wind Powered
  • Maximum performance RAID-10 MySQL Servers
  • 24/7 Live Support
  • 99.97% uptime (independently verified).

Visit GreenGeeks to learn more about their outstanding Drupal hosting.

Do you use GreenGeeks hosting? How about GreenGeeks Hosting for Drupal?
Post a comment and share your experience.

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