About Hostmonster

Located in Oram, Utah, Hostmonster has been a premium hosting provider since 1996. The company currently hosts thousands of professional and personal web sites on their state-of-the-art infrastructure. According to the Hostmonster website, they “provide businesses and individuals with a high-powered service at a fraction of the cost.”

 

Plans and Features

Hostmonster’s basic hosting plan costs $6.95 and brings you a huge 1,500 GB of storage with another massive 15,000 GB of monthly bandwidth. At signup, you’re gifted a free domain of your choice and you can host unlimited domains on your account. Also unlimited are add-on domains, redirects, subdomains, FTP and email accounts, and autoresponders. You can create and use up to 100 MySQL and PostGRE databases. For developers, you’ll find that PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby On Rails enjoy integrated support.

Other great features include blogging software including Wordpress, b2evolution, free mailing list management, shopping carts viz. OS Commerce, Agora, and a free generated SSL security certificate.

The plan comes clad with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Hosting Environment

Hostmonster uses standard cPanel software for account administration. Through this panel, you can manage the various aspects of your account along with email accounts, databases, website files etc. phpMyAdmin comes pre-installed for easy database management. Should you require modifying of advanced DNS settings, Hostmonster’s support staff will do it for you upon request.

Joomla Specific Features

Joomla, along with Mambo, is fully supported by Hostmonster and is available as a one-click install feature. This is done through Fantastico.

Tech Support

Hostmonster takes its customers very seriously and sports a very sophisticated support system. You can access technical staff through email, live chat, and toll-free telephone. There is also a help-ticket section on the Hostmonster website where you can open a support ticket and wait for it to be reviewed. Most general questions, however, can be solved by browsing the dedicated Hostmonster knowledgebase, or their support forums where hundreds of users participate.

Conclusion

Hostmonster is a solid hosting provider run by veterans in the business. Their combination of highly competitive pricing, a very confident set of features, and excellent support, all add up to one reliable host that you can turn to at any given day for your hosting needs.