Perfect web host for smaller sites.. and CHEAP!
Written: Nov 16 '00 (Updated Feb 05 '01)
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Pros: Great price, jam packed full of features, above average support, MySQL, etc
Cons: No easy telnet access, very strict against "pornography," not perfect support
The Bottom Line: Great basic web host with lots of extras. Made for the smaller website owner who knows what they're doing.
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| jeremyf's Full Review: Linux Web Host |
I host two web sites on LinuxWebHost for hobby purposes mostly since December 99 (for payyobillz.com and punkest.com). Their prices are great, their service is (mostly) great, they're very reliable, and you'll get a pretty good bang for your buck.
Note that LinuxWebHost is just a name
-- Pricing
LinuxWebHost (LWH) has plans that start from $7.95/month to $24.95/month, although most people will do great with the $7.95 or $9.95 plans. There are NO setup fees for any hosting plan.
LWH charges $20/year for .com/.net/.org domain names, which is a good $15/year cheaper than Network Solutions or Register.com. They do all the work so you don't need to know what a DNS is. However, if you're a miser, you can easily buy a domain elsewhere and use LWH's DNS servers. For example, DomainMonger.com charges $17/year, and GKG.net charges from $8.99-$12.99/year, depending if they have specials when you're shopping.
My favorite part about LinuxWebHost is that they cater to "resellers," which means if you have an account with them, you can sign up additional web hosting accounts for half off. This means that if you purchase one webhosting account at $7.95/month, and your friend Roger wants to host his website, he can go through your account and pay only $3.98/month. This also works if you have two sites you want to host. I have two $9.95 accounts and I pay ~$15/month for both.
All accounts include MySQL, Frontpage, CGI-BIN, etc. (More features listed below.) The cheapest ($7.95)) account offers 50 megs space and 3 gigs of transfer. The $9.95 account offers 100 megs and 4 gigs.
Many "large" web hosts charge over $20 per month AND charge a setup fee for the features of LWH's $7.95 plan, so I'll give LWH five stars in this department. However, you can find slightly cheaper plans if you shop around a lot.
-- Reliability
I can't say much here, besides that the web site is almost always up. There are times where I've noticed it's down for a couple hours, but this happens once or twice a month at most. If you use a major web hosting company like Verio you'll probably get a slightly more reliable web host, but unless it's imperative your web site is always up, LWH is very sufficient.
My web pages usually load VERY fast, although sometimes they do rather slowly. This is also rare but also sometimes a bother. I'd estimate this happens about twice as much as a total blackout of the site.
-- Ease of Use
Basically, you don't need to know much to use LWH effectively. One of the major features of LWH is their "control panel" which you can easily access at any time and tinker with many settings for your web site. My favorite is "Site Statistics," which shows you how many hits/files/pageviews/sessions/kbs you deliver per month, day, or hour in neat little charts. It lists your site's top URL's, referrer domains, and user statistics. It's not quite as good as something like Hitbox, but there's no extra outside code needed.
Other features in your Control Panel include:
* File Manager, which you can use instead of an FTP client to upload or alter your files.
* Mail Manager, where you can add POP3 mail accounts (up to 50 for the $7.95 account, up to 100 for $9.95) and make them forward to other accounts, if you want.
* Redirect URL's, so that you can VERY easily redirect a file or URL to another one. This is very useful if you change the URL of your message board, etc.
* Password protect directories.
* Search Engine (Webglimpse), so that you can add a nice search engine to your site.
* Anonymous FTP, Frontpage extensions, Mime types manager, PGPMail public key management, MySQL management, Secure Server management, and counter and formmail adding.
-- Problems/Support
I've only had a few problems with my LinuxWebHost account. The support has always been very fast to respond (within a couple hours), with a couple exceptions. When I asked if I could have a subdomain set up (mail.punkest.com) so that I could use that for web-based e-mail at everyone.net, they simply didn't respond. Three times! It wasn't that big a deal for me, as I simply set it up at punkest.com/mail instead (with the neat URL redirect feature).
Another major problem I had is when I uploaded a somewhat pornographic picture to my website (as a joke; my friend joked I needed more porn:[), my web site and account got completely DELETED and I got no notice why. When I e-mailed support, they explained they did not allow any pornography (and explained their backbone searched all files for pornography, which seemed kind of strange since it was never in a public place). They quickly re-set up my account but it could have been a VERY big deal if I didn't have everything backed up on my computer. It could also be a very big deal if you allow users to upload files and they upload smutty files.
One more problem with LWH is that you don't get normal telnet access unless you mail in a form with a copy of your ID (and a good reason) to use secure telnet. I didn't want to bother with this so I just FTP.
Other times I have contacted LWH (to upgrade my accounts twice, and to change my MX settings for my mail server, for example), they were VERY quick to reply.
LWH also has a very (although not completely) thorough support text at http://support.linuxwebhost.com, which I've used many, many times.
-- Overall
I highly recommend LinuxWebHost. It's relatively cheap and is jam-packed full of features. The support isn't the best but they're well above average. Make sure you check their web page for the exact specifications, but from what I've found they have near the best feature/cost ratio out there.
-- Update 2/5/01
My hosted sites seem to load MUCH faster and more reliably now (I haven't noticed any downtime in at least a month). However, I do keep having a problem filling up my 100 megs of web space. When this happens, nothing can be written to the disk, which can REALLY screw up any CGI programs you have going (in my case, message boards). You can go to your "menu" to see how much space you have left, but if you're lazy like me, this can be a problem. Nothing else should be expected though! You only pay for so much, and you can always upgrade (for a price). My 5 star rating stands. :D
Recommended:
Yes
Monthly fees (US$): 9.95
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content
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jeremyf
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Location: West coast
Reviews written: 150
Trusted by: 198 members
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