I just signed up with verve hosting a few weeks ago and I am very impressed with the service so far. They offer the lowest priced hosting plans that I’ve found, and have superior customer support.

What you get

For just $5 a month you get

- 10 megs disk space
- FTP access and a linux shell account
- 5 POP3 Email address
- 5 subdomains
- CGI-BIN (Perl, PHP, MySql etc)
- Unlimited Email Forwarding and Unlimited Autoresponders
- 3 GB Bandwidth
- A nice control panel feature*

They also have more expensive packages that offer more, but this is the one I bought.

In addition they will register your .com, .net, or .org domain for only $15. Unfortunately they won’t register any of the new .tv or .ws domains yet. You can also transfer a domain that you already own onto their servers.

You can use your credit card to purchase your service online and within a few minutes you receive an e-mail with the IP address for your page and you can begin uploading files and using it. They say that within 24 hours your domain will “propagate” and you will be able to type it in to get to your page. Mine only took about 2 hours and it was all set up.

*The Control Panel

When I first signed up with Verve I didn’t know anything about the Control Panel feature, but now that I have discovered it, I love it. It tells me more information than I ever dreamed of knowing, including: How many hits I’ve gotten, the ip addresses/ or domains of my visitors, what OS/browser/screen resolution they use, what site they came from, what site they entered on, what site they left on, what files they visited, what files returned 404 errors, keywords that were used to find my site, days and hours my site was visited most, the trail people followed through my site, and many other things that I haven’t used yet. The control panel shows all of these statistics with actual numbers, percents and graphs, by week using Wusage 7.0.

Quality

I have had no problems with verve hosting so far. I’ve yet to see them be down and my page always loads quickly for me. Their directions are clear and easy to understand and they have a very informative FAQ on their web site that answered some of my questions.

Customer Service

I was very impressed with the customer service I received from their tech support. This was the first time I have ever set up a domain, so I had a few questions. I e-mailed them at 10:30 P.M. and I had an answer back in my inbox within 5 minutes. I have gotten the same type of speedy responses each time I e-mailed them with my questions.

Conclusion

I am very impressed with Verve Hosting and their $5/month package. It gives me everything that I would need for my small page, and I would use them again if I needed another domain hosted.




Recommended: Yes

Monthly fees (US$): 5
Platform used: Linux
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content